The Reason for the Season

Zeus

     A nearby farmer manages to come up with all the usual dull questions asked by the faithful. For one thing, if there is no Zeus, who brings the rain to water the crops? Inviting the man to use his head for a second, Socrates points out that if Zeus could make it rain, there would or could be rain from cloudless skies. Since this does not happen, it might be wiser to conclude that the clouds are the cause of the rainfall. All right then, says the farmer, who moves the clouds into position? That must surely be Zeus. Not so, says Socrates, who explains about winds and heat. Well in that case, replies the old rustic, where does the lightning come from, to punish liars and other wrongdoers? The lightning, it is gently pointed out to him, does not seem to discriminate between the just and the unjust. Indeed, it has often been noticed to strike the temples of Olympian Zeus himself. This is enough to win the farmer over, though he later recants his impiety and burns down the school with Socrates inside it. Many are the freethinkers who have gone the same way, or escaped very narrowly.
Christopher Hitchens
God Is Not Great... How Religion Poisons Everything

Cha-Ching

To me, one of the biggest tragedies of life would be placing hope, faith, and trust in a philosophy that guaranteed an eternal existence of incredibly great contentment and happiness on the condition that an enormous amount of money is paid and the qualities of empathy, honesty, service, and personal improvement are constantly emulated, and every rule invented by the philosophy remains unbroken. In other words, pay money and act in a manner that all humans are already naturally inclined to act. 

To me, an even bigger tragedy of life would be placing hope, faith, and trust in this philosophy then discover that it's promises are bogus and it's only true motivation is to control people and to take their money. 

There was a time once in my life when I broke one of the rules of the philosophy I embraced and should have been excommunicated but leniency was extended and I was only disfellowshiped. The other day, I came across the official letter that spelled out the terms of the disciplinary action. Essentially, it stripped me of all privileges like praying in church, singing in the choir, participating in any ordinances like the sacrament, exercising my priesthood like home teaching or giving blessings, and attending the temple. The tone of the letter was constructed in a manner to imply what a travesty it was for me to be denied such wonderful blessings. Interestingly enough, it clarified that I was to continue attending church, reading the scriptures, praying in private for forgiveness, and paying my tithing..!

I have suspected for awhile now that religion in general is only motivated by money. When you consider the amount of money involved (that we are allowed to know about), it becomes hard to ignore how lucrative that form of deception is. It draws us in and numbs our senses to the point that we relinquish complete control of our entire existence into its hands. We endow it as the purest form of goodness and benevolence in our lives while, in fact, it is the biggest deception making it the lowest of all thieves that preys on our greatest vulnerabilities.

I have tried to explain my suspicions to friends and family but they are so deeply caught in the trap and their reasoning has become so deluded that they believe that; even if it's false and costs them a lot of money, their belief makes them happy and causes them to do good and to live fulfilling lives and all of this brings them peace and contentment, so why change?

I wonder how many of them would hang on to a credit card that charged 500% interest based solely on the fact that it provided nice things in their lives and made them happy and content, so why not keep using it?

How the End of Faith Allows for the Beginning of Action

Why I no longer remain active in the

Mormon faith nor maintain a belief in any religion

(The following quote was penned by Sam Harris (1967 -) in his book entitled, The End of Faith, Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason Pp 223-227. It has helped me realize that belief in dogma is counterproductive and a waste of time. I cannot deny that, during an earlier period in life, I believed my prayers were being answered but I now better understand the workings of the human mind. I do not have all the answers but I trust humanity and I remain optimistically encouraged by its proven techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, and correcting and integrating previous knowledge given that its inquiry is based on empirical and measurable evidence and subject to specific principles of sound reasoning.)        lrg

“My goal… …has been to help close the door to a certain style of irrationality. While religious faith is the one species of human ignorance that will not admit of even the possibility of correction, it is still sheltered from criticism in every corner of our culture. Forsaking all valid sources of information about this world (both spiritual and mundane), our religions have seized upon ancient taboos and pre-scientific fancies as though they held ultimate metaphysical significance. Books that embrace the narrowest spectrum of political, moral, scientific, and spiritual understanding—books that, by their antiquity alone, offer us the most dilute wisdom with respect to the present—are still dogmatically thrust upon us as the final word on matters of the greatest significance. In the best case, faith leaves otherwise well-intentioned people incapable of thinking rationally about many of their deepest concerns; at worst, it is a continuous source of human violence. Even now, many of us are motivated not by what we know but by what we are content merely to imagine. Many are still eager to sacrifice happiness, compassion, and justice in this world, for a fantasy of a world to come. These and other degradations await us along the well-worn path of piety. Whatever our religious differences may mean for the next life, they have only one terminus in this one—a future of ignorance and slaughter.

            We live in societies that are still constrained by religious laws and threatened by religious violence. What is it about us, and specifically about our discourse with one another, that keeps these astonishing bits of evil loose in our world? We have seen that education and wealth are insufficient guarantors of rationality. Indeed, even in the West, educated men and women still cling to the blood-soaked heirlooms of a previous age. Mitigating this problem is not merely a matter of reining in a minority of religious extremists; it is a matter of finding approaches to ethics and to spiritual experience that make no appeal to faith, and broadcasting this knowledge to everyone.

            Of course, one senses that the problem is simply hopeless. What could possibly cause billions of human beings to reconsider their religious beliefs? And yet, it is obvious that an utter revolution in our thinking could be accomplished in a single generation: if parents and teachers would merely give honest answers to the questions of every child. Our doubts about the feasibility of such a project should be tempered by an understanding of its necessity, for there is no reason whatsoever to think that we can survive our religious differences indefinitely.

            Imagine what it would be like for our descendants to experience the fall of civilization. Imagine failures of reasonableness so total that our largest bombs finally fall upon our largest cities in defense of our religious differences. What would it be like for the unlucky survivors of such a holocaust to look back upon the hurtling career of human stupidity that led them over the precipice? A view from the end of the world would surely find that the six billion of us currently alive did much to pave the way to the Apocalypse.

            This world is simply ablaze with bad ideas. There are still places where people are put to death for imaginary crimes—like blasphemy—and where the totality of a child’s education consists of his learning to recite from an ancient book of religious fiction. There are countries where women are denied almost every human liberty, except the liberty to breed. And yet, these same societies are quickly acquiring terrifying arsenals of advanced weaponry. If we cannot inspire the developing world, and the Muslim world in particular, to pursue ends that are compatible with a global civilization, then a dark future awaits all of us.

            The contest between our religions is zero-sum. Religious violence is still with us because our religions are intrinsically hostile to one another. Where they appear otherwise, it is because secular knowledge and secular interests are restraining the most lethal improprieties of faith. It is time we acknowledged that no real foundation exists within the canons of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, or any of our other faiths for religious tolerance and religious diversity.

            If religious war is ever to become unthinkable for us, in the way that slavery and cannibalism seem poised to, it will be a matter of our having dispensed with the dogma of faith. If our tribalism is ever to give way to an extended moral identity, our religious beliefs can no longer be sheltered from the tides of genuine inquiry and genuine criticism. It is time we realize that to presume knowledge where one has only pious hope is a species of evil. Wherever conviction grows in inverse proportion to its justification, we have lost the very basis of human cooperation. Where we have reasons for what we believe, we have no need of faith; where we have no reasons, we have lost both our connection to the world and to one another. People who harbor strong convictions without evidence belong at the margins of our societies not in our halls of power. The only thing we should respect in a person’s faith is his desire for a better life in this world; we need never have respected his certainty that one awaits him in the next.

            Nothing is more sacred than the facts. No one, therefore, should win any points in our discourse for deluding himself. The litmus test for reasonableness should be obvious: anyone who wants to know how the world is, whether in physical or spiritual terms, will be open to new evidence. We should take comfort in the fact that people tend to conform themselves to this principle whenever they are obliged to. This will remain a problem for religion. The very hands that prop up our faith will be the ones to shake it.

            It is as yet undetermined what it means to be human, because every facet of our culture—and even our biology itself—remains open to innovation and insight. We do not know what we will be a thousand years from now—or indeed that we will be, given the lethal absurdity of many of our beliefs—but whatever changes await us, one thing seems unlikely to change: as long as experience endures, the difference between happiness and suffering will remain our paramount concern. We will therefore want to understand those processes--biochemical, behavioral, ethical, political, economic, and spiritual—that account for this difference. We do not yet have anything like a final understanding of such processes, but we know enough to rule out many false understandings. Indeed, we know enough at this moment to say that the God of Abraham is not only unworthy of the immensity of creation; he is unworthy even of man.

            We do not know what awaits each of us after death, but we know that we will die. Clearly, it must be possible to live ethically—without presuming to know things about which we are patently ignorant. Consider it: every person you have ever met, every person you will pass in the street today, is going to die. Living long enough, each will suffer the loss of his friends and family. All are going to lose everything they love in this world. Why would one want to be anything but kind to them in the meantime?

            We are bound to one another. The fact that our ethical intuitions must, in some way, supervene upon our biology does not make ethical truths reducible to biological ones. We are the final judges of what is good, just as we remain the final judges of what is logical. And on neither front, has our conversation with one another reached an end. There need be no scheme of rewards and punishments transcending this life to justify our moral intuitions or to render them effective in guiding our behavior in the world. The only angels we need invoke are those of our better nature: reason, honesty, and love. The only demons we must fear are those that lurk inside every human mind: ignorance, hatred, greed, and faith, which is surely the devil’s masterpiece.

            Man is manifestly not the measure of all things. This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of our own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name. The consciousness that animates us is itself central to this mystery and the ground for any experience we might wish to call “spiritual.” No myths need be embraced for us to commune with the profundity of our circumstance. No personal God need be worshiped for us to live in awe at the beauty and immensity of creation. No tribal fictions need be rehearsed for us to realize, one fine day, that we do, in fact, love our neighbors, that our happiness is inextricable from their own, and that our interdependence demands that people everywhere be given the opportunity to flourish. The days of our religious identities are clearly numbered. Whether the days of civilization itself are numbered would seem to depend, rather too much, on how soon we realize this.”

I'm A Little Teapot

Bertrand Russell's Parable of the Celestial Teapot

From Richard Dawkins' book "The God Delusion"

Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of skeptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.

Something Beautiful

The Psychological Effects of McDonald's

For a lot of people, McDonald's is enough. They could eat McDonald's all their lives and be completely satisfied.

You've grown up on McDonald's and for a time you enjoyed it. You might even be grateful for it because McDonald's came along and freely gave you burgers and fries when you were starving. But these days you are curious and thoughtful about the quality of the food. You ask if there are any other types of food on the menu? What ingredients really go into the beef patties? What's the nutritional quality of its products? You may have even watched Supersize Me!

You ask to have a meeting with the CEO and you begin to express your doubts. He says, ' You've been watching food documentaries and listening to food podcasts again, haven't you? You need to stop that, and read our menus, watch our commercials, and pray about their truthfulness and you'll find your way back to the light only McDonald's can provide'.

For the entire story, go to Mormon McDonald's An Allegory  by Gina Colvin.