Posts Tagged ‘mysticism’

"Anti-Christianity"?

Wednesday, February 15th, 2006

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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Posted in fanaticism, mysticism, religion | 2 Comments »

The “power” of prayer

Wednesday, August 31st, 2005

The Christian Bible says that “faith can move mountains”.

Me, I believe all the faith in the world can’t move a grain of sand one millimeter.

But, of course, don’t take my word for it. Here’s something to do, if you’re a Christian (but it can work as well if you subscribe to some other creed which says faith has power over the material world):

  1. Pick a perfectly normal coin.
  2. Pray to God, fervently, with all your heart, for it to come up as “heads” when you throw it into the air.
  3. Throw it into the air.
  4. Write down the result in a piece of paper.
  5. Repeat 2-4 a large number of times (at least 100, preferably more).
  6. Calculate the average for “heads” (number or “heads” results divided by number of total throws).
  7. The average is a number between 0 and 1, so multiply it by 100 to get a nice percentage.

So, tell me… did it go the way you expected? And did you go the way you prayed it to go? Were they the same, by the way? ;)

I’d bet (assuming a perfectly normal coin, well thrown, a large number of times) that the average is close to 50% – about half heads, half tails. If so, that means it was random – that prayer didn’t change a thing. (If it was 90% “heads” or more, though, and you can reproduce it whenever you want, even using other coins, or having someone else do the throw while you pray, then, why, you’re a million dollars richer…)

What happened (assuming the normal 45%-55% result)? Did God refuse to be tested by our “heathen” “secular” “worldly” science?

    ”I refuse to prove that I exist,” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.”
    ”But,” say Man, “the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.”
    ”Oh dear,” says God, “I hadn’t though of that” and promply vanishes in a puff of logic.

— Douglas Adams

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Posted in mysticism, reality, religion | 14 Comments »