Quit trying to convert me!

What people say to try to convert me to their religion.		My answer.
If you would read the Bible/Koran/whatever, you would see the light and come to God.		I've read the Bible - twice from cover-to-cover, and different parts and chapters over many years, from the time I could read until - well, now. I've also read the Koran, as well as various Haddith. I've even read some of the Book of Mormon. And... I'm still an Atheist. In fact, the more I've read the Bible or the Koran, the more obvious it is to me that religion is all superstition and, quite often, bigotry and hatred. No thank you!
If you would pray and open your heart to Jesus/God, you would see the light and come to God.		I prayed every day, probably twice a day, up until I was about 13. I felt nothing, my situation was never altered, but I kept doing it, because that's what everyone kept saying to do, and I was desperate for things to improve in my life. I would stand there in various church services and silently say, "Okay, Jesus! I'm ready! Come on down! I'm ready!" And nothing would happen. NOTHING. After I became a teen, I would pray just every now and again, hoping that maybe it would finally work and I'd feel the Magic Warm Feeling everyone said I would. Nothing happened. Once I stopped praying and, instead, started thinking strategically about how to address this or that problem, stopped looking for God and started looking and creating solutions, life became a LOT more manageable - even JOYFUL, something it never had been before.
Christianity / Islam / Whatever is the one, true religion.		That's what you all say! Do you realize you all use exactly the same rhetoric to tout your religion's legitimacy? Everything I've heard about current religions could be said of cults of Zeus!
I just KNOW that Christianity / Islam / Whatever is the right religion, and I just KNOW that God exists - I can just feel it!		Well, goody for you. Gut feelings are fascinating - and often wrong. I never had a gut feeling that God existed, FYI, so that made it a lot easier to stop the pursuit of a magical, invisible friend.
It's been God that's gotten me through the worst times of my life. He could do that for you, too, if you would just believe.		Really - he got you through knee surgery or that divorce or the death of your loved one, but to that 10 year old girl getting raped in Congo and begging for his help, he says, "Too bad!"? Give me a frakin' break.
Without God, you will have no moral compass.		Without God, I've still got values, ethics, a strong, passionate sense of what's right and wrong.
Without God, you will never know real joy or passion.		That statement, or something like it, is one that people like John Shore and Oprah Winfrey repeat again and again. The REALITY is that I've known FAR more joy once I accepted my Atheism than I did when I tried to be a Christian. The joy I've been able to access, joy that I never felt when I was trying to be a believer, cannot be denied, even by you.
What will you do when Jesus comes back to Earth and Final Judgement happens? (FYI, both Christians and Muslims believe in this)		That's like asking me what I will do when the aliens land their space ship on the Mall in Washington, D.C. Or what I will do when the zombies rise and attack. It's NOT going to happen! How can I have an answer to a situation that isn't going to happen?
You know I'm right. You just won't accept it.		Sigh... the arrogance of this statement drives me more crazy than any of the others. There's no way to answer that kind of blind self-righteousness.
Who created the Universe? It had to start - it had to be created. There's only one possible answer: God!		Who created God? He had to start - he had to be created. There's only one possible answer: Man!
God has to exist - how will we answer the question "Why are we here" without God?		When you have an answer about why he kills millions of people, and permanently injures and tortures millions more, in endless numbers of natural disasters - and allows men to kill and torture millions more - let me know.
You need to quit questioning. Just accept.		Bite me.

My responses sometimes get the statements to me to stop, sometimes not. I hope that they help some of my fellow Atheists out there respond to the ongoing efforts to convert them to whatever religion is being promoted. 

These efforts to convert you can be exhausting and insulting. They can leave you feeling attacked and drained. So when you need to recover from this nonsense thrown at you, I recommend 10 minutes at least on the I Fucking Love Science Facebook page. And wine. 

Yet another Christian leader ignorant about Atheists

Did you hear the one about the Anglican minister who said atheists have no reason for grief? I didn't, until Greta Christina blogged about comments by Rev. Gavin Dunbar, who argued that, unless you believe in God, you have no reason to care whether the people you love live or die, or even to love people at all.

Thank you, Greta, for saying what needed to be said - but I wonder if Gavin Dunbar even bothered to read your excellent comments. He obviously needs a LOT of education. He has no idea who Atheists are, our very real values and feelings. Is he ignorant - or willfully insulting?

North Carolina votes for... what?

Yesterday, North Carolina voted to ban not only gay marriage, but all legal civil unions, including those of straight couples.

This does not strengthen marriage in North Carolina. No straight, religious, married couple in North Carolina is now going to be married longer, and have a more fulfilling, happy marriage, because of this vote. That's absolutely irrefutable.

Here's what this amendment does do:

• If a gay person is admitted to a hospital and the hospital decides only family can visit that person, his or her same-sex partner cannot visit. It doesn't matter if that couple (yes, they can still be called a couple) has spent thousands of dollars and oh-so-many hours to have legal paperwork that says they will have this right if such a scenario presents itself. That paperwork is null and void in North Carolina.
• If a gay person dies, the parents, siblings or children of that person - who that person may not have talked to in years - will have all rights regarding the funeral and burial. Regardless of any relationship that person may have with someone of the same sex, even a 20-year-old partnership, that partner can legally be excluded, entirely, from the planning - even from attending. It doesn't matter if that couple has spent thousands of dollars and oh-so-many hours to have legal paperwork that says they will have this right if such a scenario presents itself. That paperwork is null and void in North Carolina.
• If a gay person gets a job that gives health insurance coverage to a spouse, his or her same-sex partner cannot get that coverage, under any circumstances. 

How does any of that make straight marriage stronger? It doesn't! In fact, straight Christians will continue to sometimes (often?) have relationship and sexual problems, will continue to sometimes (often?) have adulterous affairs, and often get divorced. This amendment does NADA to address those things.

By contrast, without this amendment - if you, North Carolina, allowed gay marriage - here's what would never, ever change:

• If your church does not recognized gay marriage, it would still not recognize gay marriage. Just as a Baptist church is under no obligation to allow Muslim weddings, just as a Catholic church could refuse to marry to non-Catholics, your church would get to continue to refuse to recognize gay marriage. You can refuse to perform such ceremonies, you can ask such people to leave your grounds. That doesn't change no matter how marriage is defined.
• You get to continue to be disgusted by gay marriage, just as I'm disgusted by child marriage, a marriage where there is more than a 30 year age difference between the partners, or religious marriages that require women to stay in abusive relationships. You get to continue to speak out about how you think it's awful, stand up and leave the room in a huff when someone says they support it, ignore people engaged in it, etc.
• You get to continue to refuse to attend any wedding among any two people you don't think should get married, gay or straight.
• Straight people like Kim Kardashian and Brittney Spears will get married for just a few hours/days.
• Gay people would continue to live together, love each other, even hold hands in public.  

So what good did this amendment do you, straight married religious couples of North Carolina?

None. Zilch. Nada.

Consider this, voters of North Carolina: most of you are Christians. But you aren't the same kinds of Christians. In fact, some of you would say that some others of you are NOT Christians. I've heard Church of Christ people say no one else is Christian but them, I've heard Catholics say no one else is a Christian but them, I've heard Baptists say that neither Catholics nor Mormons are Christians, and on and on and on. You people loooove to debate who is and isn't a Christian. You would have gotten to do the same thing regarding gay people had you NOT passed this amendment: you would have gotten to continue to say, "I believe marriage is between one man and one woman and, therefore, those guys over there aren't really married." You would get to continue to believe that, with all your heart. But if you are an intensive care unit nurse, you would have had to keep that belief to yourself when a man came to your unit to see his husband - would that REALLY have been so hard? Are you going to feel better telling that man, "No! You cannot see him! Ha ha!" Is that really what Jesus would do?

Why should your religion - which I do not believe in, by the way - get to determine which loving, adult, consenting couples get to get married? You say marriage is something that is sanctified by God and was created for the purpose of having children - yet here I am, an Atheist who is not having babies, and I was allowed to marry. Are you going to try to take away my marriage now?

This was a vote that was driven entirely - ENTIRELY - by religious people, particularly and especially Christians. And it represents so much of why we Atheists find you just as reprehensible as you find The Gays.

The one true religion

This is what it's like for me when someone tells me why they are a Christian or a Muslim:

The Journey - becoming an Atheist

The journey from religious dogma to Atheism / Secular Humanism isn't one that goes from a place of comfort and certainty to despondency and hopelessness, as those that believe in a magical, invisible friend (or several such friends, for that matter) will tell you.

Rather, it is often a journey from a place of great discomfort and disquiet, a place of fear and and required prejudice, to a place of wonder, joy, acceptance, appreciation and exploration. This article in the New York Times maps such a journey.

...he rounded up favorite quotations from Emerson, Thoreau, Confucius, Siddhartha, Gandhi, Marcus Aurelius, Martin Luther King and more. From the New Testament, too. He put each on a strip of paper, then filled a salad bowl with the strips. At dinner he asks his kids to fish one out so they can discuss it.

He takes his kids outside to gaze at stars, which speak to the wonder of creation and the humility he wants them to feel about their place in it.

He’s big on humility, asking, who are we to go to the barricades for human embryos and then treat animals and their habitats with such contempt? Or to make such unforgiving judgments about people who err, including women who get pregnant without meaning to, unequipped for the awesome responsibility of a child?

Beautiful!

Is your religion strong enough for science?

I subscribe to Carl Sagan Quoted on Twitter. Every day or so, a quote from Carl Sagan gets sent out. Here was one recently that I really loved:
“Any faith that admires truth, that strives to know God, must be brave enough to accommodate the universe.”
This quote really struck me, because it's something I've been thinking about a lot:
Fundamentalist Christians, fundamentalists Muslims, and fundamentalist anything, must say in their minds, "Oh, I trust this medicine that has been developed using the science of biology, and I will get on this plane and fly because of the work of people that applied the science of aeronautics, but I reject evolutionary biology, plate tectonics, and the laws of physics beyond the sphere of the Earth."
While I did, indeed, grow up in the Bible Belt, I was never discouraged from ignoring or rejecting science. It's one of the reasons I continued to attend church for so long despite not having the faith I was supposed to have - I didn't feel a God, but nothing was said against science in most of the churches I attended, and the pot lucks were so delicious - religion continued to accommodate the reality I experienced and everything I learned in school, and since I had no idea there was a viable alternative to attending church, I kept going. Maybe if it hadn't I would have embraced my Atheism much sooner.
I'm not worried about any religion or faith that embraces science. But the ones who don't absolutely terrify me - and defy all logic.

Basketball is my religion

Want to make a Kentucky Atheist angry? Show up at my door to proselytize during March Madness. WWJD? Not do that.