Here’s a tragic example of what happens when your loved ones are ensnared in the clutches of religious dogma:

My Darling Son David,

You are so very special to me and have always been the love of my life. I used to think when you were little that I would die for you, and live because of you. You meant the world to me and I will always love you very much.

Because of this love I always wanted you to have the happiest, safest life I could provide and tried to bring you up with the strongly held beliefs I lived by, in the hope that this would affect your own life for the good and ultimately you would live forever in Paradise on earth. You know all this be the case.

I personally have always believed in the Truth as presented in the Bible and have always felt the strong presence of Jehovah God and Jesus in my life, even as a child. I have always believed the prophesies in the Bible, and that there will be paradise on earth in which everyone will live in peace and love with no war, sickness and death, and that the dead will be resurrected due to Jehovah’s justice and fairness. I have always lived my life with all this in view, and have never sought a worldly, secular career or pathway. Becoming one of Jehovah’s Witness was the obvious next step for me.

This letter is being written by me with no outside coercion or influence because there are things I want to say to you. Being in the Truth had never been easy but when all is said and done, I am in it because of my belief in Jehovah, and what he has done for us, and will yet do.

I’m always a little suspicious whenever someone says specifically in a letter that they are not being coerced.

People will always let you down, and somehow we have to look above and beyond, at the bigger picture. So to say that some people who profess to be Christians live in ways that show them to be hypocrites is no exaggeration. But I strongly feel that whilst they may fool themselves and others, they can’t fool Jehovah, and “it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the Living God”.

I have chosen my path and my way of life and so I must live by the commands and statutes laid down in the Bible by Jehovah himself. One of these commands has been the cause of great stress and grief to me, and I have put it off for too long now. I realize that I would have benefitted [sic] spiritually by doing things Jehovah’s way from the start, and I must emphasize that what I am about to say to you is not influenced by any other living person, but is purely directed by my conscience and a desire to regain my peaceful friendship with God. Nobody can make me do anything I don’t want to do.

I’m always really suspicious whenever someone claims not to have been coerced…multiple times in the same letter.

whilst this is the single most painful thing I have ever had to do in my entire life, I need to move forwards towards the goal of everlasting life, and to this end I deeply regret that I must terminate our relationship whilst you remain disfellowshipped.

I have cried myself dry over this situation, and it has broken my heart , but David you have known that it should have been handled this way from the start. You have chosen your path in life, and I wish you all the best. I want you to know that not only will my love always be there for you, but Jehovah too is waiting with open arms for your return.

Your loving mother, now and forever.

Her last line says it all; confused about her own delusion and her love for her son, she’s created an imaginary opening to have him back in her life: simply return to God and all is forgiven! Hey, it’s what Jesus would have wanted. He did say, after all, that you should abandon your families if they don’t believe in his ownership of all reality. How else are you suppose to manage a cult?

Every day, another religious mouth breather with a keyboard attempts to find a way to argue the atheistic worldview is antithetical to the welfare of society. It’s so painful to read these articles specifically because at no time do any of these morons ever come close to making a valid point. The latest frustration to hit my peepers is an article entitled “Atheists Get Religion All Wrong“. This unidentified author tries to argue that as non-believers, we don’t really “get” the purpose of religion:

Let’s say those religions do disappear, even this very afternoon…Will all the problems of the world cease – would wars, terrorism, sexual molestation of children, discrimination, jealously, theft, just stop…Would peace and goodwill descend on Earth?

Of course not.

Well, we already know for a fact countless conflicts around the globe, the systematic cover-up of sex abuse by various faiths, the spread of AIDS in Africa and the murder of children due to dangerous superstitions would be severely reduced. While the whole world wouldn’t suddenly be holding hands and singing songs together, why does the end outcome have to be perfect anyway? No atheist has ever argued the world without religion would achieve perfect amenity; it would just get a hell of a lot better, that’s all.

If one wants to make the intellectual effort to understand religions one should look at the whole and not just the part. No one has to, of course, it’s all entertainment anyway. But still, maybe there is a reason why religions endure.

Tuberculosis may “endure”, but it isn’t because of some benign reason. Superstition is the same; our brains may be wired to jump to irrational conclusions when faced with few facts about the world (which is why filling it with facts is so corrosive to faith), but this doesn’t suddenly mean this is a desirable mental state. It was just a very practical one at the time. As for “understanding religion” more, do you get the immediate impression the author of this article only really understands faith from a Christian perspective? It certainly smacks of it when making broad statements that all religions are concerned about sins, or “fallen” people. Anyone who believes these are the primary concerns of most world religions throughout history has obviously never truly studied them.

The news remains: people do bad things and would be better off if they did the right things. The funny thing about this religious idea is that it is based on a fact. It is scientifically without exception verifiable that every single naughty, wrong, bad, evil is done by people. This fact preceded and gave rise to the religions.

How is “you’re better off doing something good rather than bad” a religious idea? Only a person indoctrinated with the nonsense of faith could even begin to believe that’s true. Animals in nature obey their own form of the “Golden Rule” and yet require no sermons nor holy books to accomplish this. The author is right: the golden rule is a fact, but it’s better understood as a mathematical principle than the revealed word of God.

If atheists want to dismantle religions they need to dismantle this verifiable fact and the belief that things could be better.

It’s ironic a person who has a literal belief a God will someday come and wipe out the whole of humanity in a holy war could even accuse others of failing to believe in a better tomorrow. Only a mind so steeped in religious nonsense could even stand that degree of cognitive dissonance. The largest religious denomination in North America is a death-cult obsessed with the end of days, a product of the embarrassing death of their messiah. This version of a “better tomorrow” involves rivers of blood, plagues, disasters and death. How is any of this dangerous nonsense needed to believe in a future more just, prosperous and peaceful?

I hate it when our commitment to rationality is attacked for no other reason than religiously motivated people feeling slighted from the accusation that rational thought is abrasive to belief. In light of a recent study that found rational thinking diminishes religious faith (at least temporarily), a few mouth-breathers are attempting to argue being rational isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

It’s misleading for Harris to define faith as “belief without evidence,” Haught says. Faith, which is similar to “trust,” is embedded in our humanity. Atheists, for instance, act out of faith when they trust their partners, or even when they hope rationality is capable of solving every problem.

It’s interesting this author is trying to conflate the various definitions of faith. While it’s true I trust my partner will be faithful, I do so because I have plenty of evidence of fidelity in the past. This trust may not always be a “rational” thing to believe, but it is grounded in some degree of reality, something religious faith cannot claim. To use this shitty example against itself, if there was any proof my partner no longer deserved my trust, then it would quickly erode my “faith’. I can assure you there is little in the form of evidence that moves a religious believer away from their dogmatic commitment to bullshit.

Even though atheists are correct in saying many faithful people do come to irrational “supernatural” conclusions, Haught says theologians have for centuries offered a more complex definition of faith.

More sophisticated forms of nonsense are still rooted in nonsense, regardless of the relative intelligence of their proponents. Besides, so few believers are actually familiar with these arguments that one wonders if they should even bother to come up with more ridiculous justifications for believing in things without evidence.

The author seems to believe rationalists are incapable of imagination, or even intuitive thinking, when in fact, our commitment to rationality is a statement about knowledge itself. While I fully accept not all aspects of humanity should be governed by rationality, it does not mean the irrational ideas of the religious are suddenly true, or even meaningful.

In other words, as Einstein suggested, authentic scientists may well be rational and analytic — but they also have imagination, vision, empathy and a sense of values and aesthetics. All of which helps guide them in their intellectual pursuits…In that way, scientists are just like many spiritual people.

If you chose to so poorly define something, then sure, you could claim that. Or, if you used your brain for a moment, you would realize perhaps what these people have in common is imagination, although that similarity ends as soon as one group decides what they feel intuitively must be the truth without even bothering to back it up with any evidence. If scientists were more like spiritual people, then we wouldn’t have a lot of good science; just a bunch of meaningless, untested theories.

Ultimately, what Haught and the author fail to realize rationality is what grounds us in reality. While I don’t deny that we must let our imaginations soar once in a while, it does not mean that we should suddenly abandon what is still our most important weapon in our intellectual arsenal. To suggest rationality is overrated in a world still dictated by so much superstition is both dishonest and ignorant. Perhaps if our society was ruled exclusively by logic and cold rationality, I might agree. As it stands, I think the world could use a lot more of it, not less.