This site’s religion category, currently, has a lot of posts where I condemn Christianity and its doings. Am I anti-Christian? Do I have a bone to pick with Christianity? Is that it?
Not exactly. You’d be slightly more correct if you said I was anti-religion, but that’s still not the entire truth.
What I really am against is irracionality. Religion is just one particular case of that.
Religion, and mysticism (here I use this word in the sense of “any belief in the supernatural” - I am aware that some people use the word for a specific type of beliefs), are irrational - they’re wishful thinking, they’re the (comforting) belief that reality isn’t real, but is changed on a whim. As Carl Sagan used to say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and no religion has any evidence supporting, it, other than “it’s written so in some old books” and “a lot of people believe it”. Therefore, to believe in something so extraordinary (it’s no more believable than Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny) without evidence is absolutely irrational.
I also say that while a few religious people may have done some good, as a whole, religion has only harmed the world, has only held back the advancement of humanity, and is guilty of more death and suffering than anything else in the world.
Why my focus on Christianity, and not, say, Islam? Personal experience, I guess. Islam is just as bad as Christianity, if not worse (more about that in a future post); it’s just that, living in Western Europe, it’s Christianity that I see around me. And when I study history, again, it’s Christian atrocities that come up. The United States (I don’t live there, but I read a lot of American blogs and news sites) are becoming more and more fundamentalist and irrational (just look at the choice of president) because of Christianity. I was raised a Christian. Is it any wonder that I speak more against Christianity than against other religions?
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Hey yeah. Here is an site that has some Carl Sagan videos.
Enjoy.
http://www.youtube.com/user/4chris10s