Hate is integral to religion

Religions pay lip service to love but it is hate that grows and maintains religions.

Christianity has never been about love. It was born as a fanatical death cult and prospered most when it killed, tortured, and terrorised men, women, children, and whole cultures who who defied it.
They called men heretics and women witches and they burned them alive. Those that didn't burn, converted.

Mohammed tried to start Islam but wasn't doing very well, so he moved and started killing to make his point. Islam took off and people flocked to Mohammed to be in his cult that let them kill and rape with God's blessing.
The religion of peace.

Christians tell me that Jesus is all about love. The old testament had no Hell. Jesus brought us Hell.
Some love!
"Love me or I'll torture you forever!"

Religion is hatred of all who do not share your religion.
The Christians, Muslims, and Jews all look down on others because each believe their religion is the only true religion.
But if there's one thing they hate together, it's atheists. They will drop all arguments to stand up for religion over disbelief.
The Pope proved this in his comments after the Muslim Charlie Hedbo killings, when he said that religion must not be mocked.

Disbelief and mockery are the worst things to a religion.
The former gives you no money and may tell the truth. The latter exposes religion for the farce it is.

Words of peace and love are all nice and rosy but it is hate that makes religions successful.

Quick! What are the two biggest religions in the world?

How did they get so big?

God wants you to be dumb

He punished Adam and Eve for eating of the tree of knowledge.
He turned Lot's wife into a pillar of salt for her curiosity.

And now his churches tell you that faith is greater than knowledge.

What better way to dumb down a population than to have God tell you that education is bad because it takes away from faith?

The cure for religion is education.

That's why there are serious attempts to put creationism in public schools; to remove the threat of an educated population learning that religion is the cause and ritualised continuation of your fear wrapped up with a bow.

Prayer is a self delusional activity.
Chants and songs are mnemonic devices to push aside reason.

Replacing knowledge with faith is the denial of evidence.
It is the assertation that you can pick up a turd by the clean end, when a cursory glance will tell you that from one end to the other it's pure shit.

The devious part is that there's no need to pick up the turd. You can smell the stink of it from a distance.
And yet the church will tell you that if you ignore the evidence and have faith, that the turd can be picked up by the clean end.

What are you going to do with a turd?

The atheist movement needs a name change

A common atheist viewpoint: If I have a movement, all I want is to be alone... and some paper.

Take any two atheists and they will probably have more in common that a non belief in gods.
But each random pair of atheists will have entirely different commonalities than any other pairing because the only thing that all atheists share is the non belief in gods.
We may have similarities but they are not part of the definition of atheists.

I don't want to be identified as an atheist. I dislike being counted as a member of a club I did not join.
Atheists didn't join a club, a group, a flock, a congregation, or a church.
We were named as non believers, as outsiders, as strangers for a reason... we might speak of our disbelief and it might make sense to a believer.

The word atheist shouldn't exist. It was invented by religions to mark those who would not do as commanded.

Even so, atheists are not religious rebels. We can't rebel because we are not part of the group. We are completely outside the religious world.

So what are we? We are those who resist the influence of religion in society because, in our outsider lives, we see religion as it truly is, without the faerie glimmer of faith and blind belief.

What can we call ourselves that does not have roots in religion?
Atheists? Outsiders? The list is long for names that have religious rebellion as their theme.
I reject them.
To find a name we must try to find similar characteristics that we share.
Most atheists are intelligent but I do not favour Brights. It has a condescending feel to it, making it a religious rebellion name.

I considered Reasoners, Resistors, and Solvers but they all suggest an anti theistic origin, when I think a name should what a group believes, not what they disbelieve.
It has to be a name that has absolutely nothing to do with religion.

How about Nines?
"I'm a Nine."
"I'm a Niner."
Based on 360 degrees, in which all angles adds up to 9.
It's logical, scientific, and you can go to any sporting goods store and buy a number 9 to sew on any garment.
(Nobody's getting rich selling Nine crests.)
And it has nothing at all to do with religion, religious people, or non belief.

"If you only knew the magnificence of the 3, 6, and 9, then you would have a key to the universe."
Nikola Tesla

Whatever we end up calling ourselves, it will be worn proudly. We are the minority of humanity that values reason over blind belief and kindness and empathy over ignorance and fear.

We resist religion to ensure progress and the future of humanity... but religion is not our defining trait.
We are the reasoners and the solvers and the seekers of truth.

I like Nines. It sounds right from any angle and there are degrees of meaning.

Let me know what you think of Nines in the comments or on Google+ or twitter.

Are atheists more moral than theists?

Yes, they are.
Atheism destroys excuses for people to subjugate others. It frees people from religious biases and imperatives and allows them to see the human equation.
Once you stop thinking of others as less important (because your religion tells you you're one of the chosen people), all others  must be seen as fellow human beings.
Atheism's complete lack of the religious 'chosen people' idea necessitates basic human compassion and equality.
When we are all equal as people, we tend to discuss more and demand less. A lack of religious arrogance would mean an end to many of the worst human woes.
Atheists are often asked, "How can you have morals without God's laws?"
Atheists are more moral than religious people because we choose to be moral, instead of being moral because we're afraid of going to hell.
Morality can't be forced. It isnt morality if you act in a moral fashion because of the threat of torture.
Morality is not based in fear.

The things that make religions immoral are simply not present in the atheist non belief.
• Atheists do not believe they are a chosen people.
• Atheists do not have an easy method of forgiveness for immorality.
• Atheists do not cover up for each other's immoral acts. In fact, much like scientists will denounce a bad hypothesis by other scientists, we argue the immorality of atheists as strongly as we argue religious immorality.
• Atheists do not have a belief we have to put before evidence, so we're more honest to ourselves.
• Atheists do not have a book telling us to convert the world to atheism.
• Atheists freely choose to live moral lives.
• Atheists don't even like to capitalize 'atheist' because we don't want to let even the name become dogma.
• Atheists do not kill for atheism.

Atheists are good and moral people, who just happen to not believe in gods.

I was wondering...

There are insects whose bodies glow with light.
Their bodies glow!

There are spiders that hide under a trap door that they build themselves.

There are carnivorous plants that eats insects by catching them and dissolving them alive.

A cheetah can run faster than you're allowed to drive in the city.

Some animals can change their skin texture and colours to perfectly camoflauge themselves in their surroundings.

Dolphins have empathy.

Ants make bridges of themselves to cross obstacles.

The ancestors of dinosaurs are alive today.

Hummingbirds!

Tardigrades!

The natural world is filled with so much wonder and awe.
I don't understand the need to believe in the supernatural when nature can fill me so.

From quantum entanglement to unimaginable distances in space, everything is connected.

Humans!

We are nature.
If you go outside on Sunday morning with a magnifying glass and a pair of binoculars, you'll learn more about wonder and awe and the overall connectivity of all things than you will singing hymns and reading from your book.

We are alive! We're natural!

Go outside and get connected to nature.
Smell the fresh cut grass, feel the sun on your face, the wind on your skin. Delve the forest deeply and sense the unseen life surrounding you.

There is a whole world living between the bark and the tree.

See the night sky and imagine that you can only see the tiniest piece of one corner of only one of the one hundred billion galaxies in the universe.

Everything is part of you as you are part of everything.
And it's all connected.

Created by a god 6000 years ago?

This has been disproven by science.
Only a mentally ill person or an idiot could honestly believe that, though there are plenty who will gladly take the money of the mentally ill and the idiots... because it beats an honest day's work.

How do you help those so fooled that they resist your help with tooth and nail?
Only education will help them.

And wonder.


A little extra...
If you want to do something fun, go through that list of wonderful things above and wonder what emotions they feel as they're doing what they do.

Who decides who gets free speech? You?

There is power in words, and to deny the right of someone else to speak is to deny yourself that right.

And yet, every activist cause has people who will try to silence you, try to discredit you, try to get you fired, all for speaking your opinion.

This recently happened with Sir Tim Hunt, a Nobel Prize winner, who was accused and labelled a misogynist for some out of context words. The social media lynching was nearly immediate. Calls for his retirement, his firing, and all kinds of nasty memes. He was made a pariah... because of an attack article with no basis in truth!

Feminism, LGBT rights, swear words, animal cruelty... the cause is irrelevent. It is free speech that gave all those things their power.
In many cases denying the freedom to express an opposing opinion has helped many causes become successful.
You can't deny free speech simply because someone doesn't agree with you or you don't agree with them.

Free speech does not end where your cause begins, no matter the righteousness of your cause. In fact, the more righteous your cause, the more important it is to allow dissenting opinions.

Increasingly, I see good people telling others they can't say something because they believe they have the moral right to tell others what they are allowed to say.
They don't. Nobody has that right.

You can tell people to shut up, but they must have the right to refuse to be silent.

You have to deny censorship, in order to not be censored.
You have to allow free speech, in order to have free speech.

You can't achieve equality by taking the rights and freedoms of another.

Argue. Debate. Discuss. Defend.
But the instant you censor free speech should be remembered... that is the instant you surrendered your own free speech.

Life in the fascist lane

Most atheists do not seek to create a world free of religions.
What most atheists seek is a world free of the abuses of religion... a world in which every adult is allowed to choose what they do or do not believe.

If you do not seek freedom from religion as earnestly as you seek freedom of religion, then you do not truly seek freedom.

If you seek freedom only for your own religion, you are at heart in favour of religious tyranny... of theocracy.

You are a fascist.