Many people are familiar with the term Stockholm Syndrome. For those of you unfamiliar with it, here is an explanation from Wikipedia:

Stockholm syndrome is a psychological response sometimes seen in abducted hostages, in which the hostage shows signs of loyalty to the hostage-taker, regardless of the danger or risk in which they have been placed. The syndrome is named after the Norrmalmstorg robbery of Kreditbanken at Norrmalmstorg in Stockholm, in which the bank robbers held bank employees hostage from August 23 to August 28, 1973. In this case, the victims became emotionally attached to their captors, and even defended them after they were freed from their six-day ordeal.

This seems to resemble Christianity in a way. Or any religion with salvation and damnation. I feel churches do employ these techniques to make better followers. Christianity starts off by telling you about the evils and pain of Hell, but then they tell you about salvation. If you just do whatever we say blindly and without questioning, you will make it to the next life and be happy. This produces a strong impact on people. They begin exhibiting signs of sympathy for their religion. Look at the people who defend the church at all costs against heresy, science and opposing ideas.

Psychologically, Hell can be an extremely scaring concept. It can take some people YEARS to get over those fears, even if they no long believe in the concept. Hell wasn’t even originally part of Christianity either. The Hell we know of today, only shows up in the New Testament. It was clearly an afterthought, to help control people.

I’m not sure that Stockholm Syndrome is the best analogy though; it may be too strong. Yes religion can have drastic negative effects, but is it equivalent to having a gun up to your head? If anything it is a watered down version of Stockholm Syndrome. What do you think?

I saw this image on Reddit yesterday.

After seeing it, I was curious as to wether or not it was true. So I pulled up Google.com and typed in christianity is and sure enough all of those suggestions came up. Then I tried islam is and was presented with nothing. Don’t believe me? Go try it yourself. I highly doubt this is Google purposefully doing this, but it is kind of strange that this happens. What do you think?

This is the conclusion to yesterday’s post. If you missed the first part, go back and read it! This is definitely something that is worth your time to read.

Did none of the translators have an agenda that might cause them to falsify a bit on interpretation?  It would always be “For our own good,” of course.  “The ends justify the means” has been used very often in human affairs.  Consider the King James version of the bible.  Because the translators were being paid by King James, could it be that they were careful not to include anything that would offend his majesty?  For example, nothing in the bible addresses the “Divine right of Kings” either pro or con.  Could it be that something was conveniently omitted in this regard?

The facts are that there is not one bit of evidence to support religion and creationism while there are millions of pieces of evidence to support science and evolution.  Similarly, there is no evidence to support a protective, loving god and plenty of evidence to support a random, chaotic universe albeit with some clearly defined laws such as gravity, conservation of energy, and causality.  Even these, as Steven Hawking postulates, may only be local phenomena.

Take the issue of prayer, would an omniscient, omnipotent being cared if we prayed to it or notice the posture we adopted?  That would be is if one of us expected an amoeba to worship us and flex its cell in a certain manner as it did.  Such demands would be unworthy of the deity we are supposed to believe in as ruling our lives.

Another basic tenant of religion is to instill guilt in people for any conduct not specifically approved by that particular creed.  The first area all religions and other repressive organizations attempt to control is sexual conduct.  Perhaps this is because the religionists know that if they control when, where, and how people are permitted sex, controlling the rest is easy.  Sex is the most natural and necessary of human functions and to restrict it is to ensure false guilt and great anguish in people.  One might as well say that breathing is wrong and should be rigidly controlled and permitted only under certain circumstances.

Perhaps a basic part of human nature is a need to feel superior to others.  If so, imposing artificial standards of conduct and then condemning anyone who fails to meet those standards would appeal to many people.  Does religion play well upon this tendency?  It would certainly appear to do so.  It teaches forgiveness and tolerance but practices these virtues only rarely and then only to those whom agree with the other principles of that religion.  The same people that condemn others are very often guilty of the same or worse “sins” themselves.  To quote Robert A. Heinlein, “The only real sin is hurting someone else unnecessarily.  Everything else is invented nonsense.”

If we examine the past and current practices of major religions, we can see that tolerance and acceptance are only given lip service but not practiced.  Take the words of Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham. “Islam is an evil and very wicked religion.”  Not much tolerance or “Christian” love there, is there?  On the other side of the same coin, it is Islamic Mullahs that refer to the United States as “the great Satan” and urge followers to commit suicide bombings.  Neither religion contains much in terms of deeds to inspire people to be better human beings.  Israel, of all nations, should understand the need for a homeland and self-rule for people.  Yet, it has consistently denied the Palestinians the right to the same.  This is toward a people that share much in terms of race and religious background with them; no matter how much both deny it.

In Northern Ireland, Catholics and Protestants have been killing each other for many years even though they are both supposedly “Christian” and obviously are all Irish.  All of this is in the name of “God” as in “God Bless America” or “Got Mit Uns” (the German motto in WW I) and “Allah Akbar,” the universal Islamic credo.  So we are looking at conflicts where both sides are firmly convinced that “God” is supporting their cause and so will smite the infidels.

Having said all that, it is likely there are natural forces in the universe that we do not understand.  The writer, Richard Bach, once wrote an essay that stated the ancient Egyptians could fly.  They had bamboo, paper, linen, and all the components needed to build gliders.  The Nile Valley has good thermals and reliable winds so they could have had gliders that traveled hundreds of miles in their day.  But we know they didn’t because they were ignorant of the laws of aerodynamics even though those laws were as true then as they are now.  They didn’t know, so they didn’t go.

Could it be that there are other natural laws and forces of which we are now ignorant?  Experience in the martial arts has shown me that there are energies in the human body that are not well understood but work all the same.   We have all heard feats like little old ladies suddenly lifting a burning car off of a trapped child.  Physically, this should be impossible, the tendons and muscles of a human should not be able to do this.  But it still happens.  How?  Choose your own interpretation.  I believe it is chi, piranha, psychic energy, or “the force”.  Whatever you call it, some unknown but tangible effect of humans under stress.  Not magic, as the Egyptians would have regarded flight.  Someday, we might understand this as well as we know the laws of aerodynamics.

Today I have a guest post from James Smith. Recently he has been quite active in the comments on another post. His responses frequently featured smart rhetorics and great arguments. The post will be split up over two days as it is quite long, but well worth a read. If you like this, check his blog out.

Reading history, it is apparent that organized religion exists to make it easy for a small group of people to control a larger group.  Organized religion has been responsible for more human suffering, both physical and mental, and death than plagues, natural disasters, and wars. (many of which were about religion)

Consider that most religionists will not allow dissent or debate on their core issues.  If someone does dare disagree, they are invariably shouted down and condemned as “Godless Heathen”, “infidels”, “pagans”, shunned, or even killed.  Is this the command of a loving, protective god or the whim of an immature, vengeful deity?  “For I am a jealous god.”  “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”  But isn’t there only supposed to be one god?

When your position will not allow argument or debate, the problem is not with the debate but with the position.  If you cannot defend your beliefs with facts, you should examine your beliefs and not mindlessly spout what you have been told.  A basic truth in life is that “Beliefs, no matter how sincerely held, do not alter facts.”

Religion does not encourage free speech or thought.  People thinking for themselves and discussing their thinking would be the destruction of organized religion.  Obviously, this cannot be permitted so they have priests, shaman, and clerics to tell us what to think and believe.  To quote H. L. Menken, “I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious.”

Even so, people will ignore the most obvious of facts to cling to their illusions.  Think about all the people who still smoke in spite of the often-repeated facts that they are killing themselves and others.  What about drug users?  People still start on drugs even when they have seen horrible examples of famous, wealthy people destroying themselves and even dying from drug use.  Most people believe and do what they want no matter what facts and evidence against it may be.  This one human characteristic can account for the existence of organized religion more than any other.  There is also the human tendency to want to believe there is something that will enable them to overcome their condition without any real effort on their part.  “God will save us if we only pray hard enough.”

Think about this.  If you knew of someone that was aware of a great evil being performed and that person could stop it with no danger or real effort to himself, yet does nothing.  Would you consider him to be as bad as those performing the evil acts?  More than likely, you would.  Yet, that is exactly what all deities do: nothing in the face of great evil and suffering.  Still, we are supposed to consider them to be loving, protective gods.  In human behavior, we call this being “an accessory after the fact” and you can go to prison for it in many countries.

The Christian/Jewish/Islamic tradition is of an omnipotent father figure taking care of each of us.  There is no evidence of this at all.  They all say you must “have faith.”  Does that mean believing in something we know can’t be true?  Then they say they have the torah/bible/koran.  These all were written by men, usually decades or centuries after the time they portray and have been translated many times from many languages.  Are no errors ever made?  Most languages use idioms and allegories that change over time.  Totally understanding these in a language not one’s own and that may no longer be spoken is not possible.  To attempt it is to invite errors of major proportions.  A good example is the English phrase, “putting on the dog” meaning to ostentatiously overdo something.  It is not universally used, even in English.  As a phrase, it makes no sense at all.  A translator, believing it to be the word of God, might assume we are to wear live dogs as part of a religious ceremony.  Admittedly, that makes as much sense as wearing gold robes and miters to “Glorify God.”  Ask yourself, “Would an omnipotent deity need or even desire any glorification from us?”  If there were a god, it appears that rather than being an omniscient, protective being we are seeing a juvenile, vindictive, cruel despot.

No, they aren’t forcing you to take a Bible class, but it is required to be in ALL high schools. Basically take Britain’s compulsory evolution education and flip it inside out.

Attorney General Greg Abbott told the Associated Press this bill does not require the schools to make the course mandatory, but they do have to make it an elective. It is “mandating high schools to offer history and literacy courses on the Old and New Testaments.”

That sounds fair. Give interested students a chance to learn about a religion of their choice. Nothing wrong with that. Except, what is happening in Texas is a little different. The only option being mandated is the Bible.

The bill wanted to educate the Bible’s impact in history and literacy, but what about other religious scripts?“These courses are often more about the religious beliefs of the teachers rather than true academic studies of the importance of the Bible in history and literature,” said Kathy Miller, director of Texas Freedom Network, to Fox News.

Ahh see there in lies the problem. This is nothing more than a direct promotion of Christianity. Who the hell are you to decide your faith is right? Only true Christians are concerned with the history and academics, the other faiths just want to preach personal views. What? This would be screwing over a sizeable amount of the population. About 15% actually.

According to a 2007 study by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, of the 35,556 adults surveyed for the “U.S. Religious Landscape Survey,” 15.5 percent of the Texas population practices a religion other than Christianity or Catholicism. This includes Judaism, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu and those unaffiliated.

I imagine this will be subject to some litigation and eventually be repealed. I am okay with religious classes in schools, but atleast be fair about it. Maybe all these asshats should analyze our Constitution for a change. Would save us all time and money..

I’m sure many people know about how sexist Islam is. Women have to walk around in burkas for Christ’s sake. As usual, Christianity is also guilty. First of all, let’s look at a  definition of sexism from Princeton:

discriminatory or abusive behavior towards members of the opposite sex

Okay that seems clear enough to me. Now the good book of truth wouldn’t go as far as to make women seem inferior, right? Well actually there are quite a few places I can point to show you that it in fact is.

1 Corinthians 14:34 – 35

34. Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but [they are commanded] to be under obedience, as also saith the law.
35 And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church.

Wait. Women aren’t even allowed to speak in the house of their Lord? Seems atleast somewhat sexist to me. Another thing I have always wondered, is man was created from clay/dust. Women were created from a rib bone. I even heard a Christian tell me this before, “I am not sexist, but the Bible says God used a rib bone. We all know the rib is the cheapest piece of meat available”. No of course not, that isn’t sexist. Bullshit.

God also punished Eve in the third chapter of Genesis. He gave her greatly increased pain during childbirth.

Genesis 3:16

16. Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire [shall be] to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.

What punishment was Adam given? None. That’s right none. What about this whole fact that God is usually looked at as a male form? Why? There is no female counterpart to Him. Why couldn’t God simply be sexless? It reinforces a patriarchal society allowing women to be abused and mistreated. It also takes away feelings of guilt, I mean it says this is okay in the Bible so it must be ok. I also think it’s a good point to note that these phrases appear throughout both the Old and New Testament. So this is one of those cases where you can’t simply say it doesn’t apply anymore. It really just shocks me how there are so many phrases of evil and discrimination lodged in the Bible. Even more disturbing is the way nearly all Christians are ignorant of these things. Appears to me like Biblical writers were sexist, homophobic bastards who wanted to perpetuate their thinking and hide it behind God. I’ll end with a few more quotes of sexism:

Timothy 2:11-14:
Let the Woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a Woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve and Adam was not deceived, but the Woman being deceived was in transgression.

Corinthians 11:7 – 9

But I would have you know that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the Woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God… For the man is not of the Woman; but the Woman of the man. Neither was the man created for the Woman; but the Woman for the man.

Oh wait. That’s right. A theocracy only fucks things up worse. Guess that’s why its called the um DARK AGES!

I think this pretty acurately depicts some popular religions. Thought I would share it with you guys.