BTW, got your Robertson’s mixed up.

Atheism did not kill anyone, evil dictators did, and by the way, Hitler was not an atheist and his ties to the catholic church are very well documented.

anti_supernaturalist , you’re NOTHING but a deceiver and a slithering viper!!!

• vicious circles of religious irrationality eventually end in repression and violence

To read those who discourse in absolutes on behalf of some fictional “god” nauseates me. What happens when others’ “absolutes” don’t bow down to yours? Do you use a so-called sacred text to justify its own contents? Of course you do. Must you thump harder on your fictional screeds, supposedly dictated by a divine voice? Of course you must.

Vicious (logical) circles are a refuge for the refuted. Religious ideologies dictate the type of interpretive gloss true believers scribble in the margins of fiction perversely accepted as holy discourse.

Budding theocrats, unchecked by secular authority, will initiate repression, violence, even a coup d’état to impose their holy government — very much related to founding our secular state are the disastrous Puritan takeover of power in Britain (1649-1668) and Gibbon’s analysis of xianity’s central role in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776). The Constitution of the United States which is . . .

• the founding document of our secular state does not contain the word “God.”

James Madison, primary author of the Constitution, in 1789 explained its two prescriptive clauses limiting the reach of religious authoritarianism:

“. . . Congress should not establish a religion, and enforce the legal observation of it by law, nor compel men to worship God in any Manner contrary to their conscience.” (Source: 1 Annals of Congress 730. August 15, 1789)

These three simple demands appear in the anti-establishment doctrine of the first amendment and in the no religious test provision of Article VI Section 3. — The Constitution makes freedom of conscience a necessary condition for unfeigned religious belief to be possible.

Here is radical freedom which millions of Americans would deny to all of us. Even should some “god” exist, as claimed by theism or by deism, we have the sovereign right to reject any claim that “It” must be acknowledged, accepted, or worshiped.

Disbelief, as a form of a psychological attitude toward some claim, does not require any evidence. I may simply declare that your scriptural god is unworthy of my belief — for example, just sensing “His” androcentrism, I think that “He” stinks. And despite the alleged metaphysical consequence, I’m quite prepared to go to some xian Hell as a location where all the best souls will be found.

• a thought experiment in freedom of conscience you can try alone at home

Dare to exercise your rights to disbelief and to be free from religion. Consider, if you can, the import of any supernatural claim should it be false. First, there would be no supernatural agents, locations, states, or events of any kind whatsoever:

1. No supernatural agents: minds, souls, spirits, ghosts, godlings, gods, God (Allah, YHVH), cosmic soul, absolute.
2. No supernatural locations: hell, purgatory, heaven, buddha realms, moral world order, transcendental existence
3. No supernatural states: the numinous, sin, grace, revelation, life after death, illumination, nirvana, buddha mind.
4. No supernatural events: mysterium tremendum, redemption, resurrection, rapture, mystical union, karma, or reincarnation.

Second, nothing would alter in reality: not the Universe, the Solar system, the Earth, physical events, biological events, psychological events. Humanity’s supernatural hypotheses say nothing about nature —

Third, nature itself would be neither meaningful nor meaningless. Neither a source of comfort nor a source of despair. Both ideologies are rooted in the same mistaken presupposition that meaning should be found by searching “the starry heavens” for divine agents or by quarrying human inwardness for moral or cosmic “laws”.

Altering Nietzsche: There are altogether no supernatural phenomena, only supernatural interpretations of phenomena. (Compare, Beyond Good and Evil. section 108.)

• religious Ponzi schemes offer nothing but mendacious humbuggery and vampirism

Faith provides no contact with reality — consequently religions, above all the big-3 monster theisms (xianity, islam, judaism) clearly revealed as nothing but naked power structures must indoctrinate, lie, punish, bribe, co-opt power. They must feed upon the faithful — sucking money, time, psychological energy, and life itself — to enrich their institutions and to establish their irrational ideological agendas as theocratic dominions enforced by thuggery, violence, and warfare. (Just as the “C” Street Family seeks to do in Uganda, and later here in a theocracy. I call it “Ameristan.”)

Religions’ sacred Ponzi schemes cannot be tolerated. Their defrauded dead investors are numbered in millions; their fraudulent tax-free take in billions. Their ideologies are inimical to constitutional secular democracy and to an open society — they are dismissive of human life, freedom of conscience, and freedom of thought.

The de-deification of western culture (including the law and sciences) is our task for the next 100 years. We owe it to James Madison.

the anti_supernaturalist