Agnostic Universe

from LOL god

This is a cartoon about militants with the militant atheist portrayed as a rational person typing away at the keyboard while the agnostic buries his head in the sand and the Christian and Muslim both have weaponry. I assume it’s supposed to be a joke and I’ve seen it on some atheist blogs like Friendly Atheist where it seems to be presented as a joke. However, it reads like a smug “we’re better than them” banner. The statement it makes (serious or not) is that atheists are always so rational that even their worst adherents are better than anyone else.

Let’s look at this seriously for a moment because I want to focus on the message it conveys. The word militant means “1) vigorously active and aggressive, especially in support of a cause or 2) engaged in warfare; fighting.” Any time you argue about belief or disbelief, you’re arguing about what is most likely an unprovable viewpoint. When you argue over belief then you aren’t arguing over knowledge. One or both sides in those arguments have no interest in what is truly known or it wouldn’t last as an argument. An atheist could believe so much in their rejection of belief that their militant behavior and insistence on disbelief could be fought for with the same misguided passion as the militant believers. The term militant is about the behavior and tactics of the person and not about the belief or disbelief. Any person could be irrationally aggressive with weapons. Anyone that suggests that could never happen in the freethought community isn’t being honest about human behavior and the ability for some people to forcibly exert their will on others.

I support most of the efforts of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. However, I also see how freedom FROM religion could be twisted into a stronger and more militant stance to remove religion from the public entirely. This is similar to how some Christians want homosexuality to only be a private matter and not allow for any aspects of it to appear in public. On the extreme end of the spectrum are the Christians that don’t want to allow homosexuality in the private either. I believe in equal access in the “public square” for belief and non-belief. I don’t see how it helps society to remove or restrict religion from the religious. I just want to be free from having to support their religions with my tax dollars and from being forced to be more than a bystander as they do their thing. If we really value our own freedom from religion then I think we need to value everyone else’s freedom of religion.

I don’t ever want to see any militant people and that includes militant atheists or agnostics. Going back to that picture, the militant atheist and agnostic would also have weaponry. The militant believers want everyone else to believe as they do and the militant non-believers would also want everyone to not believe just like they do. The militant atheist would tell you that “you don’t believe” when they point the gun at you and the militant agnostic would say “you don’t really know.” I believe none of us really know or can know how or why existence came to be. All there is is belief or disbelief about such things and belief is definitely not knowledge. I’m atheist since I don’t know of anything about a creator or cause for existence that’s worth believing in. However, I don’t see the need for militancy on any side of this question since there’s no true knowledge on this subject to be defended by anyone. This is why I primarily identify as an agnostic “I don’t know, and you don’t either” instead of an atheist “I don’t believe, and you shouldn’t either.”

I just received a message from God. It’s the written word of God and carries the same amount of proof as the written word of the Bible. You haven’t heard from God directly so you just have to believe and have faith that it’s true. The truth is so self-evident that you can’t dispute this! If you don’t believe in it then you just don’t have enough faith to recognize the truth when you hear it. It’s such an amazing message that I simply have to repost it on this site to continue spreading the latest message from the true God. The Bible is just a snapshot in time and isn’t the complete story so you have to receive this message into your mind and into your heart to understand what God and the Bible really is. The Bible is causing problems in this world and in the United States and this latest message can help fix it!

The word is spreading and comes from here where I saw it and here where they saw it.

Here is the message so you can more easily read it, understand it, and use it in your life:

Dear Evangelical Christians:

God here.

First, I do not exist. The concept of a 13,700,000,000 year old being, capable of creating the entire universe and its billions of galaxies, monitoring simultaneously the thoughts and actions of the 7 billion human beings on this planet is ludicrous. Grow a brain.

Second, if I did, I would have left you a book a little more consistent, timeless and independently verifiable than the collection of Iron Age Middle Eastern mythology you call the Bible. Hell, I bet you cannot tell me one thing about any of its authors, their credibility or their possible ulterior motives, yet you cite them for the most extraordinary of claims.

Thirdly, when I sent my “son” (whatever that means, given that I am god and do not mate) to Earth, he would have visited the Chinese, Japanese, Europeans, Russians, sub-Saharan Africans, Australian Aboriginals, Mongolians, Polynesians, Micronesians, Indonesians and native Americans, not just a few Jews. He would also have exhibited a knowledge of something outside of the Iron Age Middle East.

Fourthly, I would not spend my time hiding, refusing to give any tangible evidence of my existence, and then punish those who are smart enough to draw the natural conclusion that I do not exist by burning them forever. That would make no sense to me, given that I am the one who withheld evidence of my existence in the first place.

Fifth, I would not care who you do or how you “do it.” I really wouldn’t. This would be of no interest to me, given that I can create universes. Oh, the egos.

Sixth, I would have smited all evangelicals and fundamentalists long before this. You people drive me nuts. You are so small minded and yet you speak with such false authority. Many of you still believe in the talking snake nonsense from Genesis. I would kill all of you for that alone and burn you for an afternoon (burning forever is way too barbaric for me to even contemplate).

Seventh, the whole idea of members of one species on one planet surviving their own physical deaths to “be with me” is utter, mind-numbing nonsense. Grow up. You will die. Get over it. I did. Hell, at least you had a life. I never even existed in the first place.

Eighth, I do not read your minds, or “hear your prayers” as you euphemistically call it. There are 7 billion of you. Even if only 10% prayed once a day, that is 700,000,000 prayers. This works out at 8,000 prayers a second — every second of every day. Meanwhile I have to process the 100,000 of you who die every day between heaven and hell. Dwell on the sheer absurdity of that for a moment.

Finally, the only reason you even consider believing in me is because of where you were born. Had you been born in India, you would likely believe in the Hindu gods, if born in Tibet, you would be a Buddhist. Every culture that has ever existed has had its own god(s) and they always seem to favor that particular culture, its hopes, dreams and prejudices. What, do you think we all exist? If not, why only yours?

Look, let’s be honest with ourselves. There is no god. Believing in me was fine when you thought the World was young, flat and simple. Now we know how enormous, old and complex the Universe is.

Move on — get over me. I did.

God

Praise be to the true words of God!