Christians how do you respond to this?

Taken from a friend's Blog...

THE STUPIDITY OF CHRISTIANITY
Current mood: awake

It will never cease to amaze me how many people can believe in absolute nonsense with such a zealous devotion. Faith can indeed move mountains, it also has the less enviable aspect of removing rational thought.

Thought experiment: you and another are talking when all of the sudden the dude busts into a diatribe something like this, "yea, my religion is the best. there is an all loving God (male of course). He is all powerful and all knowing (contradiction here: If you are all powerful can you create a rock that you cannot lift? Either way you are not all powerful. If you are all knowing and thus know the future of everything free will is impossible, and don't do some mountebank logic twisting to try an get out of this.). He loves us all so much that he sent his only son to die for our sins. (by the way, if he is so powerful, why kill his son to save humanity? Isn't there an easier, less sadistic way?) His son was crucified but rose from the dead to sit on the right hand of God. Oh, by the way, this son was sent to Nazareth in circa 4 c.e. And for some reason God didn't seem fit to tell the rest of the world, or to send his son at the begining of history, but owell. It is great; Jesus really does forgive sins."

Most would probably not find this to odd as we have be socialized in a culture where such an idiotic belief is taken seriously. Lets switch this around a little bit. Let us say the guy now says something like this, "Dude, my religion is the best. I believe in many Gods. The main God, Zeus, is really cool. He fornicates, and is mean. He throws lightning bolts in anger. He is really powerful and manly though, and that makes paganism the ultimate truth."

Riddiculous, no?

Well, what is the difference? Logically both have about equal chances of being true- i.e. next to none. If we were born in Ancient Athens the first claim would seem absurd, while the second would ring true. Just as if one were born in Saudi Arabia today, Islam would seem so obviously true as to be beyond repproach.

Just a few other problems here. 1) people do not rise from the dead. This is a scientific impossibility. 2) Any body who has seriously studied early Christianity realizes that the New Testament is hardly the inspired word of God. Rather it is a group of documents that were selectively chosen over a period of hundreds of years because they represented, both theologically and politically, what the emerging church thought acceptable. In fact the New Testament manuscripts in possession date no earlier than 200 c.e. This creates problems as there was no printing press back then. Thus the documents had to be hand printed by scribes who were prone to mistakes and, more insidiously, changing the texts. Bart Ehrman, the famous New Testament Scholar, points out that the King James Bible, for example, is based on flawed documents and is perhaps one of the worst translations of the bible.3) Evolution explains life and death. We don't need the help of metaphysical baggage to understand life. For those who think that evolution by natural selection is "just a theory", I can't say anything except read a book! How do you explain speciation, antibiotic resistence, our resemblance to other primates, ontogeny recapitulating (somewhat) phylogeny.. etc, etc. ad absurdum, without natural selection? 4) Since the human is a biological creature just as are all other living beings, we can depart with the assnine idea of a soul. If you get beat in the head you go unconscious. This is because the brain (material) is the mind. There is no soul in the body.

All of this should be common knowledge to anyone with even a semblance of an education, unfortunately it is not. When pressed, most Christians- who realize that arguing against science is not usually a sucessful enterprize- fall back on the personal experience, or faith argument. To see how childish this argument is, let us have a short look at it. Usually it goes something like this: "well, I can't prove that what I say is an empirical fact, but I know that it is true because I have faith. It helps me and I have experienced the grace of god."

The idea that having faith means anything is puerile and fallacious to say the least. Suppose I said I have faith that a green monkey walked around in my house, but that it was invisible to most humans. What would you say? Probably that I was insane. Or suppose I said I have faith in Bush to be the best President ever! INSANE! Funny thing is once you say it is faith, you end the conversation. You have just conceded that rational, critical thought needn't apply. Once you do this, you can make equally valid claims about every single religion that has ever existed. The second point, that you have experience god, is just as silly. Read some neuroscience. Many people have experienced many things. I have as well. This does not lead to the conclusion that the thing is real. This is a nonsequitur. Suppose I say I experienced the grace of god and it felt really great. Well, more than likely, I experienced a certain change in my brain state, i.e. hormones, peptides, neurotransmitters, etc. I then impute this to have an external cause such as God. Now, this is not to say that there is not an external cause, it is only to say that to take the gigantic leap that the experience was god is rizible. What about Muslims who have experienced Allah? Or Budhists who have experienced Nirvana? The universal principle that binds this together is that all the individuals have had brain states that they then translated according to the traditions they follow or were raised in.

It is sad and funny that so many are so ready to believe pure and unadulterated B.S. We were children and believed in the tooth fairy, Santa, the Easter bunny, etc. We lost these beliefs when we matured because they were stupid. Yet the even more absurd belief that a God exists and is watching all of us and judging us and heeding our prayers, somehow seems to remain for many.

I understand the emotional appeal, but anyone who has an education and has done some reading should be ashamed to believe in such childish nonsense without reason. If someone showed me some evidence, or could give a valid apologetic for their "faith" I would be all ears. This won't happen, however, as there is none. Now, for those Christians who don't care because you don't think about such things, shame on you! What if I believed that Jews were subhuman, gays deserved the death penalty, women should be stoned, etc. because a belief I got from my parents told me such things were just. Then when asked to justify such beliefs I just said- hey, its your problem, I don't think about such things. Utterly irresponsible to say the least. This brings me to another funny point. I will hazard a guess that most Christians had Christian parents who brought them up and indocrinated them with Christian propaganda. This is banal, but does have a point. You believe what you believe because you were brought up that way, you then may need to think about it later and try to justify it. So you believe X, but X suddenly seems uncertain. Well, you know X must be true, thats all you have ever known, how could it be wrong? What to do? Well, come up with any ad hoc argument Y to try to justify X. This is universal to the human species. However, most, when they reach a certain age, start to ask: where is the evidence? They begin to say, well I have facts Y and Z in front of me, what is the best way to interperet them? They don't have the concluding X already in their minds.

In short, Christianity is stupid and childish. Those who disagree need to learn to be rational and critical. Those who agree, more power to you. Long live reason and skepticism. As Voltaire said, "I judge a man not by the answers he gives, but by the questions he asks."

You have all the answers in your little book, but ask no questions. This is mental totalitarianism.