How many of you have seen the picture of an alligator at a door with the caption "Thank God, I thought it was a Jehovah's Witness?" Door-to-door evangelicals are the butt monkey of jokes for even Christians. Many opponents have their stories of obnoxious people who try to convert them on the streets. As annoying as their behavior is, try to understand: They truly believe that they can save you from Hell by doing this.
What is Hell? It is eternal torture for anybody who isn't in your religion, or does too many bad things. I, like many others, think that that nobody deserves such a punishment. For example, let's use Hitler. Imagine that we sentenced him to one lifetime (about 80 years) of torture for every person who died in WWII and the Holocaust. This comes out to (roughly) over 5 billion years of torture (which is a little harsh, if you think about it). At some point after those 5 billion years, it ultimately becomes immoral to punish Hitler. The same is true for anybody who would go to Hell. Eventually their time is up, because no crime, however large, is infinite and thus deserves and infinite punishment. Nobody deserves an eternity in Hell.
Now, place yourself into the role of a hardcore Christian. It is your moral duty to try as hard as possible to get as many people as possible out of Hell. Even if you took a lifetime to save just one person, it would ultimately be worth it. If you truly believe in Hell, it is then your duty to save as many people as possible from it. And if the only path to salvation is through your religion, then the only acceptable moral choice is to convert them.
I thus propose that people who try to convert others are simply following through with the rational consequences of their beliefs. However annoying they may be, at least try to understand them.
Imagine, for a moment, that I founded a religion called "Tenedorism." Imagine that one of the tenets of this religion was the being black is morally wrong. I offer no reason for this other than "God said so." Imagine that I took it upon my self to "fix" peoples' blackness. That best way to solve blackness would, of course, paint people white. Imagine if I decided to, and set up organizations to, go around dumping white paint on black people. Imagine if I used the threat of eternal hellfire to force people into covering their race up with white paint.
Would that be okay?
No.
The most insightful among my readers (assuming, of course, my viewership is plural) will have realized I wasn't just making crap up. It was a metaphor for Christianity and gay people. Whenever you discuss gay rights, a Christian who stands against it will almost invariably say "Oh, I have no problem with gay people as long as they don't perform 'homosexual acts.'" They think this is a moderate position. Of course, it is when you compare it to traditional Christian treatment of gay people, execution. When compared with human decency, this position is untenable.
Because asking gay people to not do anything to act on their sexuality is like painting black people white. You are asking them never to love. THAT IS NOT OKAY. No institution or person is in ANY position to tell people that. Outside the flimsy justification of Jehovah, there is nothing that can make being gay wrong. As long as you are not harming anyone, nobody needs to tell you how to love.
I am not gay, and statistically speaking you are not gay. But all it takes to realize that the denial of anyone's rights because of your religious beliefs is wrong, is a simple thought experiment. Imagine is I asked you never to love. Imagine that your desire to love, the same desires that are in every human being, made you unworthy of a job, degree, marriage, or a life.
All it requires it the acceptance of a simple fact: Gay people are people too. The Churches make their hatred of gay people easy by demonizing them. They create an us vs. them mentality. Gay people, at the most basic level, deserve the same rights, including their ability to act on their sexual feelings.* No religion, not your's, not mine, not Rick Santorum's, can take our rights away. The only question before us is whether or not we will continue our hatred and persecution of Gay people because of an ancient prejudice, or whether we will accept the basic fact that all humans are equal.
*Assuming that acting on their feelings does not result in the harm of another person.
Religion belongs to the people. Does that blow your mind? No? I am saying that it belongs out of the hands of institutions like Churches and into the hands of the people as a whole. Is that mind-blowing? To throw out centuries of the tradition of having an organization tell people what they should believe?
What churches fail to do is giving people the option of believing what they want. Their rhetoric is full of "You MUST believe." Religion should be open and free. Each person should be free to believe what they want without being told what they have to believe in. Churches, along with most religious institutions, do not seek the spiritual fulfillment of its members. They seek only to force people into believing in what they do. Not all churches are like this. Unitarian Universalist churches address most of the problems.
The real victim here is children. They have no option of choosing what they believe. Their God-given reason is suppressed in favor of the Parent's validation of their own beliefs. We do not let them believe, we FORCE them. This is not okay. Children lack the most basic religious education. Why? Well, if everyone chose their own religion, free of force, not many people would choose Christianity. Churches would rather suppress children's rights than risk its own destruction. I guess, from an objective point of view, this is in the Church's self interests. However, this would not be the first time Christianity conflicted with basic morality .
Religious institutions could still work. If they were places for like-minded people to have an open, educated discussion about religion, then Churches would be okay. If they no longer forced people to believe, but instead allowed people to choose what they believe. However, this conflicts with too many religious institutions' goal: The supremacy of their religion, at whatever cost. Even if that cost is the intellectual freedom of nearly EVERY child born in the U.S.
It is not only Churches that seek to control our religion. Some politicians seem inclined to preach. What they fail to understand is that they represent US. They are not being payed to tell us what we should believe. They have NO RIGHT to enforce their religion on us. This extends to priests too. They have no right to use the government as a pulpit or a police division to tell us how we should live. They are not supposed to tell us what we should believe. They are our REPRESENTATIVES, not our priests.
Deism is a religion that teaches one thing: Reason should be the basis of our beliefs, and reason leads us to believe in the existence of God. That is it. Nothing more is required to be a Deist. While most Deists have their own extended theology based on their reason, those ideas and concepts are not what makes them Deists. There is one belief in particular that is identified with Deism that is too often mistaken for the entirety of Deism: God does not interfere in the universe.
Here is a simple response: Deism is not the belief that God created the universe and stepped back from it and never interfered. No. NO. While Deists as a whole believe in significantly LESS intervention then theists, we do not necessarily believe in no intervention. We reject miracles and the like, not because we do not believe in intervention, but because we do not believe in the supernatural without proof.
This is a problem, because too many people, atheists and theists alike, use the following argument to disprove or discredit Deism:
Deism says God does not intervene
<Reasons why God would intervene in some way>
Therefore Deism is wrong.
If anyone uses that argument, whether or not you are a Deist, it is our responsibility to tell them that they are wrong. One of the main issues with religious debate is that we make too many false, or at least baseless, assumption about what other people believe. We cannot let people misrepresent any religion, and for Deists this means destroying this assumption about Deism.
Feel free to use any arguments against Deism that you want, as long as they don't falsely assume anything beyond what Deism really is.
So, today I attempted to find my blog on Google by searching for The American Deist. It turns out there is a website named americandeist.com. Now, when browsing through their articles, I came upon a post about which of the two Deists should support: Atheism or Christianity. The contend that Christianity is better. I say Atheism is better.
The article demonstrates a clear misunderstanding of Deism. We base our beliefs on REASON. Not mere faith. Our belief in our reason is second only to our belief in God. Atheism is reason based, and Christianity is not. Atheism promotes the same virtues that Deists due, other than their disbelief in God. But as I pointed out yesterday, the Deist God is very different from Jehovah. The author makes the mistake of conflating the two beings.
Who shares more in common with Deism, the Atheist or the Christian?
Atheists base their beliefs on reason, Christians do not.
Atheists reject Jehovah and his "moral" laws, Christians do not.
Atheists accept science and facts, Christians do not.
We side with atheists because their beliefs, even though we may disagree with them, are INFINITELY preferable to Christianity. They are based on reason. While our reason may lead us to different conclusions, the fact remains that our religions are more similar than Christianity. The Deist God is based in reason, the Atheist void is based on reason.
The article says that Deists do not seek to undermine belief in supernatural revelation. That, like supernatural revelation, is simply not true. Most Deists do not belief in divine revelation in the form of a book. While we believe in revelation in the form of the Universe, we do not accept belief in books. Thomas Paine made a better argument than I ever could about revelation. This topic deserves its own article, that I will eventually get around to writing.
The article completely fails to address the practical reasons for siding with Atheists: In America, we are both religious minorities fighting against the Christian majority. This reason, beyond my personal friendships with Muslims, is why I prefer not to attack Islam. Christianity is the biggest threat, obstacle, and enemy to American Deists, and we need all the help we can to take it down.
The fourth reason gets its own post, but simply stated is that Christianity promotes an atmosphere of intolerance and blind obedience to the Church, while Atheism and Deism promote an atmosphere of tolerance and reason.
Oh, and here is the article in question: http://americandeist.com/interp_pages/2%20christian%201.html
Atheists and Christians alike make this mistake. They assume that the Christian Jehovah IS God. They assume that you either believe in him or you are an atheist. They fail to understand that the word God means different things to different people.
The problem arises from our use of the word God, meaning deity of some kind, to mean Jehovah. It gives Christians a sense of credibility, that their God is the correct God, the true definition of God. My sister is an atheist. Whenever she talks about God, she means only Jehovah, not my God or the Muslim God, but Jehovah.
Atheists assume that rejection of Jehovah equates with the rejection of the concept of God. It does not. Too many people fail to understand this. They create a false dilemma of of Jehovah or Atheism. You can believe in God without Jehovah.
Both Atheists and Christians alike are guilty of and responsible for promoting this idea. The reason is the same: They both fear Deism. If Christians convince people that anybody that believes in God believes in Christianity, it stops potential Deists from truly leaving the Church. Instead, they become apologetic. If atheists convince everyone that God is Jehovah, it means that anybody who rejects Jehovah must also reject God, turning potential Deists to atheism because they feel that their rejection of Jehovah means Atheism.
Muslims, Jews, Deists, along with anybody who believes in a God must work together to destroy this notion, for the good of all of us. Deists must be especially active, for it is the fear of Deism that is strong enough to force Atheists and Christians to work together in promoting falsehoods. Too long they have crushed Deism. And now we must take the word and idea of God away from those who would use it to promote lies and falsehoods.
The core premise of Christianity, what really makes it different from Judaism, is that Jehovah (an omniscient omnipotent divine being) became a man in the form of Jesus* and he died on the cross for our sins, and through belief in him we are saved. With a few minutes of examination, we can deconstruct this, and truthfully say that this is completely nonsensical.
How?
Well, the entirety of the core belief is rested upon the idea that humans are inherently sinful. Without Humanity having sin as the default state, we would have no reason to believe in Jesus, we would have no reason to be saved, and we would have no reason to fear Hell. For Jesus to die on the cross for our sins, we must have sin. To be saved through Jesus, we must have sin. So, why do we have sin? Because Jehovah is idiotic.
There really is no other explanation when you think about it. We have sin because Eve ate the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and then tempted Adam into doing so. Thus, because we are the descendants of Adam and Eve, we inherit their sin. What the Bible, along with most Christians, fails to explain is: Why would God create the Tree, why do we deserve to be punished with eternal torture for Adam and Eve's "sin," and why didn't God just kill Adam and Eve and start over?
Adam and Eve were effectively stuck in Eden. Also, as they were created into adult form, they are just children in adult bodies. When you tell a child "Whatever you do, DON'T do <x," we all know they will inevitably try it. Given that Adam and Eve were intended to live in Eden forever, someone was EVENTUALLY going to eat from the Tree. This would cause all of humanity to be doomed. Why would the so-called God Jehovah set up a scenario where, in the end, what he wanted to happen (Humanity not knowing of Good and Evil) could have been accomplish by simply NOT CREATING THE TREE? He is either malicious or idiotic because of this. However, if he was malicious, Jehovah would not have used the Tree to give humanity sin, we would have just started out with sin. God, therefore, could only be idiotic.
If my father committed murder, would I and my siblings deserve to be punished? What if, at the time of the crime, I was unborn? Would I deserve to be punished for my father's crime? Do I deserve to be tortured for eternity because someone else committed a crime? No. We have not done anything to deserve Adam Eve's punishment of sin, contrary to what the Church may teach you.
If there is anything Jehovah likes, it is killing people who disobey him. He commands the Jews to kill every non-Jewish countries they encounter in the Old Testament. He wipes out most of humanity in the Great Flood for being wicked. The simplest solution, from God's point of view, would just simply be to kill Adam and Eve and start over. If we really are tainted by their crimes, wouldn't it have been better to make it so that nobody other than them suffered?
Many Christians, when faced with issues about the Old Testament, will simply say that it doesn't matter, that only the New Testament matters. However, the entirety of Christianity is rested upon the stone that is Original Sin. That stone, as I have demonstrated, is to weak to hold even water, and is certainly to weak to hold up Christianity. All we must do is remove the Jenga piece of Original Sin, and Christianity begins tumbling down.
*Apparently he was his son too, but yet we are all "children of God", so wouldn't that make us God too?
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