Belief is a concept that should be rethought. By belief I don’t mean a religious or political dogma; rather any form of belief. My reasoning for this is as follows.
If you hold a belief, but you don’t have enough evidence to support it, you shouldn’t have the right to hold that belief. You are entitled to your opinion only insofar as you can justify it. Belief without justification is faith. In short, belief is derivative of evidence; it cannot stand on its own.
If, on the other hand, you hold a belief for which you do have enough evidence to support it, then the fact that you hold it to be true (“belief”) is trivial compared to the evidence you use to support it.
It should be so that when you say “I believe that…”, you mean “I can prove that…”; all else is misguiding and steers the head into the sand away from logic and reason.
I’m sure you’ve seen these noble campaigners, ever-so-diligent and selfless in their campaign to save the earth from human destruction.
Indeed, that’s what these poor deluded people claim; they say humans are “destroying” the planet. But why does no one question this – what does this really mean? What is “destroying the planet”? Is there such thing? It seems to me to be the same as saying certain things which are man-made are “unnatural”, which is clearly false – we come from nature, just as everything we have interacted with. Something “unnatural” is the same as something “supernatural” per definition, and no one is claiming genetically modified foods are supernatural.
In the same way, we are not destroying the planet: there is no objective measure of destruction; there is only our perception of it. The planet doesn’t care if we destroy it. Why not? The planet has no bias. The planet has no perception of beauty or the destruction of it. It does not share our desire for beauty. “Protecting the earth” is not at all protecting the earth – it is merely protecting our own selfish interests in the earth, cleverly cloaked under the guise of altruism.
Environmentalists are egotists and liars for trying to trick us into thinking they actually care about anything else than themselves. Do not believe their lies.
I couldn't agree more.
Try debating with someone who has faith. It’s the equivalent of a child putting his hands over his ears and shouting loudly that he can’t hear you until you give up and walk away.
Try debating with someone who has faith. As soon as you make a logical case, their argument suddenly doesn’t need any evidence behind it – because your opponent has faith. They are unassailable and completely immune to anything you say, no matter how much sense it makes – a sign of a poor argument to any logician – because they have faith. And your meagre logic can’t begin to approach faith.
It is truly astonishing and indeed dumbfounding to me how one can reject logic as superfluous, just like it completely dumbfounds me how one can simply skip the process of justifying a belief and replace it with faith. Consider for a minute what faith means: it means belief without evidence. Belief without evidence. The absurdity of such a statement is dwarfed only be the fact that it is accepted.
It is important to note that faith is only invoked in religious contexts. Faith is hardly consulted when deciding whether to bet one’s life savings on a horse that has a million to one chance of winning a race. In this case, feeble logic is good enough. Let’s assume that you want to fly and have built wings to achieve this. You have done all the calculations and you are pretty sure that the wings are incapable of supporting your weight and you would fall crashing to the ground. Do you decide to do something logical like improve your wings or abandon your quest, or do you shrug your shoulders, invoke faith, and take a plunge? The answer is obvious; but when asked to justify a belief in God, suddenly, this logic that has already saved you your life’s savings and your life becomes redundant; and instead faith, the invincible trump card of theism, kicks in, as soon as there is nothing at stake. This is inconsistent and incoherent, and does not encourage open-minded debate.
Speaking of debate, here is an extract[1] from a Christian apologetics site:
Matt: I believe God exists. I have faith that he exists.
Atheist: Proof?
Matt: I have none.
Yet Matt, the apologist, still believes in God. Admittedly he does go on to say that there is evidence, but not 100% coherent evidence – and then he says what I object so vividly to: although the evidence is incomplete, faith will allow him to go from the insufficient premises to the conclusion. What kind of debating is this? A debate in which logic is eliminated is not a debate. As soon as your opponent in a debate needs faith to compensate for their lack of evidence with faith, then you have won the argument: for no argument can be won by the use of anything but knowledge. A debate involving just faith and no logic would look a bit like this:
A: “x is true; y is untrue.”
B: “You’re wrong: y is true; x is untrue.”
A: “Prove it.”
B: “I don’t need to. You prove it.”
A: “I don’t need to.”
At this point, A and B get their clubs out and start beating each other over the head, because they couldn’t resolve their differences with anything but violence – which is exactly what has been happening, and still is, for a few millennia. Because no debate is possible, the only way of convincing the other is by beating him over the head with your club. It is this dogma over who has the best imaginary friend – with neither A nor B realizing that none of these friends exist – which has brought us the crusades, the protestant and catholic conflict in England during the 1600s, which continues even today in Northern Ireland, suicide bombings on London transport, the gunpowder plot, the witch hunts, the inquisition, the Indian partition, the Israeli-Palestinian wars, the Serb-Croat Muslim massacres and honour killings. Those who recognize that coherent logic must justify belief do not do this. Those who are receptive to logic and have an open mind don’t fly airplanes into buildings. That’s what the guy whose faith says that 72 virgins are waiting for him does.
A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Faith’s longevity in existence is explained by its integral role in the functionality of religion; it is the sputtering and coughing engine behind religion. A religion which embodies faith within it is not obliged to justify anything, and they can therefore keep their followers. And if this isn’t brainwashing enough, consider how much it has been beaten into people’s heads for centuries from all angles and directions – and they go one step further. If their followers even dare to question the religion, even in their thoughts, they risk conviction of thought-crime from their allegedly omnibenevolent God and they are denied entrance to heaven: “whosoever believeth in [Christ] should not perish, but have everlasting life”[2];which inversely means that doubting Christ means not entering heaven. The combination of propaganda and fear tactics is a powerful cocktail – just look at how effective it is: people are still putting their hands over their ears and shouting loudly that they can’t hear you when you challenge them to come out of their comfort zone.
I present a challenge to all Christians: renounce your faith, step out of this comfort zone of yours, lay down your shield, even temporarily, and focus instead on questioning everything to see what is logical. Only believe what can be proved with complete and coherent evidence. If you really stick to the challenge, and if you really do question everything you hear and read, I can almost guarantee you, will come to realize that most of the stuff that you hear in church and what people talk about is not reasonable. I sense the skeptical accusations of a hidden atheist agenda here – which is good, because already you question everything, so I will bid you take into consideration that I do accept that there are a few – not many, but a few – lucid arguments for the existence of God, or at least some points that atheism cannot adequately explain; and even if you choose to stand behind one of these to defend and retain your former faith, I am content: for in doing so, you have relinquished this childish notion of belief without evidence or logic, and now follow the evidence wherever you interpret it leading.
Ponder this challenge of mine, and you will find that the only case in which you will reject my challenge is if you truly doubt and insist on clinging to your religion – if you are certain that you are correct, you will not mind challenging your belief; however if you are uncertain but genuinely want to believe you are correct, you will fear that you might be wrong, and will have nowhere to go. I hope that, no matter where you stand, you will accept, for if you can truly remove all bias from your mind and follow the logic where it goes, you will realize that you are not going into a barren place with no joy; in fact, quite the contrary. You will find how truly rejuvenating and indeed enlightening it is to acknowledge the fact that evidence, logic and reason is the only thing that can justify a belief.
I have in this article done all I can to prove why faith should be abandoned. You have a choice, reader with faith, as you finish this article: you can either accept my challenge and question what you must not question, to force it to conform to the logic by which everything else abides, and to see if it truly does work as it is claimed without having to lean on that invisible crutch that is faith. The alternative is to maintain the mental metaphorical position you are currently in: hands over your ears, shouting loudly that you can’t hear me, until I give up and walk away, leaving you to perpetuate your blind belief in your delusion.
[1] An Atheist Says He Knows There Is No God — Christian Apologetics & Research Ministry [2] John 3:16
Sure, you can believe what you like in today’s society, but I for one am I firm believer in the fact that all beliefs must be justifiable logically. For Christians, I present four questions that will make you think about the consistency of your chosen faith. In other words, if you cannot answer these questions, you ought to re-evaluate your chosen religion. These are open-ended questions by the way; there is no definitive right-or-wrong answer. As long as there is consistent logic throughout, it all works.
Question One: Why would you pray if God has a divine plan?
“What’s the use of being God if every run-down shmuck with a two-dollar prayerbook can come along and fuck up your plan?”
- George Carlin
A major part of Christianity is praying. Christians pray for everything; promotions, new cars, miraculous cures, of course choosing to ignore that God, in his omniscience, created the very situation they are seeking to change. Christians are so arrogant that they value their importance and intelligence high enough to make a perfect being with perfect intelligence change his perfect plan because their boss is giving them a hard time at work.
Question Two: Why is life valuable when it continues forever (after death)?
“That it will never come again is what makes life sweet.”
- Emily Dickinson
This is a very simple concept: if you eat sweets every day, they become commonplace and unappreciated; whereas if you eat them only once a week, you relish and enjoy them far more, and their value to you thus increases. The same concept applies with life: if life comes back after death, where does life get its value from?
Question Three: Why do amputees receive no miracles?
“If God intervenes with cancer patients to remove cancerous tumours, then God should also intervene with amputees to regenerate lost limbs.”
- www.whywontgodhealamputees.com
The Bible is packed with claims of God’s miracles: Matthew 17:20 – For truly, I say to you, if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you. In other words, faith as small as a mustard-seed will move mountains—which isn’t much compared to restoring a lost limb. Yet still, it never happens. Why not?
Question Four: Why are intellectuals more inclined to be atheist?
3.3% of the Royal Academy believe in God; along with 68.5% of the British population. 7% of the American National Academy of Sciences believe in God; along with the 71% of the US population.
Human history has been a steady progress of scientific knowledge and intelligence. After the renaissance, people started to question the logic behind God, and indeed his very existence. From thereon, as human intelligence has progressed on an incomprehensible scale (one week’s worth of the New York Times contains the same amount of information as a medieval farmer was likely to come across in a lifetime), atheism has increased too. This correlation is significant; it proves that intelligence is directly proportional to an inclination to reject the idea of a God. Now if religion was an equally plausible alternative, why is it on the decline?
Those are my questions. I would love to see some answers from believers; just leave them in the comment field, and I will probably get back to you. If you have no answers, then, as I said, it would be worth reconsidering your chosen faith.
America’s face is forever changed when Obama won the presidential race; and Martin Luther King’s famous dream is closer to fulfillment than ever. The magnitude of his I Have a Dream speech is dwarfed by what happened November 4, 2008; a date that will be the date for black history and the reversal of past racism.
I’m sure you’ve heard all this; and I’m sure you’ve made the same inferrence as I have. So let’s sidetrack a bit: I’d like to talk to you about the latest social hype: Racismophobia – the mental illness of thinking that you just might be a racist.
It’s not just a fear of being racist – it’s also saying something racist; or even thinking it. Contrary to common belief, it would seem that it is possible to take from you your opinions – believe it or not, people are reprimanding themselves all the time for their own thoughts.
Yes, well that’s all good; but what does this have to do with Obama?
As you might have imagined, the main source of this Racismophobia is the United States of America. The reason is hardly a surprise either: the Americans are still feeling the stigmatic reprecussions of a past tarnished by the abuse of blacks. The land of the free and home of the brave; yet how could the land of the free obviously be not so; and how could the number of people with the bravery to address such issues be so scarce?
This is the logic that justifies a giant, coast-to-coast guilt-trip. The entire white society is petrified of being labelled a racist; and anything that is not perfectly politically correct is treated with shock and horror, and the person in question swiftly ostracized.
Of course, one shouldn’t fret so much about this – humans are naturally prejudiced against anything it sees as different; we have evolved to automatically divide ourselves into teams, and then develop hate towards other teams. Anthropological research has proven that society functions best when there is a conceived enemy-figure. Keeping in mind that mankind has not evolved in a few hundred thousand years, it is highly improbable, and indeed very arrogant, to think that the base of human morals has significantly altered from one or two hundred years ago, when racism was commonplace and acceptable to now. Essentially, we are the same humans and we are thinking with the same brains.
What I am saying is that the vast majority of people are racists; and if you haven’t realized yet, I am saying that society’s fear of being racist is just an illusion; a superficial curtain covering the truth.
But how can I say this? First, one must understand that true neutrality comes from not taking any stance at all. Saying that blacks and whites are equal is taking a stance.
This is a big truth, and don’t be quick to dismiss it. Zen master Sent-ts’an says the same thing, except he beat me to it by 1,300 years: “if you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between ‘for’ and ‘against’ is the mind’s worst disease.”
Frankly, I do not believe that most Americans, or most people in general, even, have attained this degree of enlightenment; and instead, society continues to dwell in its firm belief that they are utterly right in saying that blacks and whites are equal; and they mustn’t deviate from this belief, lest they might have that horrible, horrible r-word used against them.
Now that Obama is president, all that will change.
There is a rich irony here – although Obama’s presidency is a huge victory over racism, casual racism will increase drastically.
With a black president, there is an even thicker curtain for subconscious racists to hide behind.
Suddenly, everyone can prove that they are not racist: all that is needed is to claim that they voted for Obama, and no longer is there anyone to look you over the shoulder and reprimand you for cracking racist jokes or using previously unacceptable terminology; and very soon, all the previous taboos from society are gone; Racismophobia completely forgotten. Comedians will feel braver; television programs will feel braver; and soon enough, Average Joe will feel braver too.
I leave you to draw your own conclusions from this. This is just a musing. I, for one, will conclude, that until I can follow the advice of Sent-ts’an, and until I know that I can be neither for nor against – I will go without a conclusion.
Rickrolling MTV: the Good News, the Bad News, and Then Some More Potentially Good News
MTV got rickrolled: Rick Astley was nominated for Best Act Ever. It was indeed the greatest rickroll of all time; I participated, millions participated, and with these millions working together, the world was shown the power of the masses. The internet phenomenon of rickrolling has spread to affect the real world in a significant way, and it happened to MTV, who were only a bit unprepared. A poll was set up on their website:
And it was absolutely demolished:
MTV quickly realized. Things had changed: the public wanted Rick to win, and if they didn’t get it, the company’s popularity would suffer – it is, after all, a business, that needs to generate money and keep popularity up. They adapted quickly, and boom, Rick is number one on the charts; the news in England are echoing with shock about the sudden surge in popularity for an artist whose biggest hit was more than twenty years ago. Rickrolling has become the greatest meme of all times, and Rick hasn’t even won yet.
Which leads me to what I’m really getting at. Rick won’t win the awards. The awards are rigged. Whoever’s sponsor pays the most gets the award. The music industry is a scandal and a tragedy: everything is manipulated to suit the consumer so that he spends more and the top dogs have more money to stuff in their already spherical wallets. However this tragedy is lessened by the underlying reality of this incident: the world has been rocked, as far as music awards go, by the masses. The people want to rickroll the awards, as is quite clear after the poll, and while MTV have been smart enough to take it onboard, if they don’t follow through and choose Tokio Hotel or Britney Spears instead, it’ll be blatantly obvious for everyone that we are all victims of corporate bullshit.
I am not a prophet. I do not claim to know that MTV will ignore Rick, and I won’t make remarks about how right I was all along if indeed it does turn out like this… and I sure do hope it will. I know that I am caught up in the moment: there are 33 days left until the awards, and enough time for the matter to cool down and people to accustom themselves to the surprise will definitely be there. The bottom line is that this is a sacrifice of the pleasure of seeing the greatest rick roll of all time fulfilling its destiny for something even greater – seeing the corporate lie fall, if just a little bit – and isn’t that, after all, the true Best Act Ever?
My musical preferences ranges rather widely; I like anything from some of the heavier rock to electro/trance. For example, I listen to Oasis, Daft Punk, Disturbed, The Pixies and anything like that. The one band that I just cannot stand, however, is Fall Out Boy.
They’ve had some hits — I’ll even admit that I straight out like some of their songs — but the overwhelming inability to sing and the appalling lyrics eclipse even the work of the studio, which has skilfully covered the worst part of the singing, at least.
I listened to Fall Out Boy performing live in Phoenix, and wish I didn’t. The only thing worth listening to was the cover of Beat It, which admittedly was good, but the rest was an apathetic display of complete inadequacy. The ability to sing is just not there, and, at least to my knowledge, singing is quite an important element for a band. I know it’s difficult without a studio and all those fancy machines there to help you, but you’ve actually got quite a large audience of poor deluded people, and maybe you should at least reveal a shadow of justification of your position by showing just a tiny bit of talent. Oh, wait.
What in holy hell has happened to artists nowadays? They don’t own their own songs, they don’t even write their own songs, and the only qualification to be successful is to have considerably sized tits. Or in Pete Wentz’s case, have nice red emo hair and a cool t-shirt.
I wish I was cool like Pete Wentz :(.
Does this pompous asshole need any explaining? Woah dude, niiice t-shirt! “Friends Or Enemies Cum”… that’s soo insightful man. And ohmygod, I love what you wrote on the website: “When you think your personality is just a collage of Seventeen articles and cleverly contrived lyrics… read a book – talk to someone very old – fall asleep with the window open – write down a secret about yourself. Escape.” That’s so deep. Thanks for the advice man. I’ll bear that in mind the next time I stumble across something which is composed of “seventeen articles and cleverly contrived lyrics.” In fact, I happen to be writing an article about a band which fits that description very well.
And just what the fuck is up with the names of their songs? If they’re trying to be rebels; breakers and setters of trends or whatever, I’ll say this right now: asinine names like Our Lawyer Made Us Change The Name Of This Song So We Wouldn’t Get Sued is surely the right way to go about giving yourself the impression of being really cool and non-conformist. Every single person of the female sex will throw themselves like lemmings in your arms for song titles like these, in spite of your horrible singing and inability to write comprehensive lyrics.
Oh, the lyrics.
This is by far the worst part. Holy jumping shitballs. Hit single Thanks For The Memories, which allegedly is about “loving a girl so much, and being so jealous of her, that you just want to cut her up into pieces and eat her,” featured these insightful lyrics:
One night and one more time (One more night, one more time),
Thanks for the memories,
Even though they weren’t so great;
“He tastes like you but sweeter”!
All girls cum to lyrics like these. And to lyrics like these:
They say I only think in the form of crunching numbers
In hotel rooms collecting page six lovers
Get me out of my mind and get you out of those clothes
I’m a liner away from getting you into the mood
So just how the fuck do you think in the form of crunching numbers, and how can you be a liner away from something? Either I’ve missed a huge chunk of the English language here, or that makes no sense. Besides, none of the lines relate to each otehr; each and every one of them is just a random sentence from nowhere. Now I don’t claim to be a poet, but I’m pretty sure that the lines in your lyrics are supposed to mean something when you put them together.
I wrote the gospel of giving up
(You look pretty sinking)
But the real bombshells have already sunk
(Pre-Madonnas of the gutter)
At night we’re painting your trash gold while you sleep
Crashing not like hips or cars
No, more like p-p-p-parties
Yeah. Makes perfect sense. Either Wentz has a lyrical mind of a complete other dimension, creating songs of such beauty that they are incomprehensible for simpler lifeforms like the rest of us, or he has shit-for-brains and an IQ of roughly -32.
You’d have to be fucking stupid to write this crap down and claim to be an artist. At least Bush, the man who used his eight undeserved years in office to bring oil prices from $17 a barrel to soon 150, fucked the dollar up good, shat on the victims of Hurricane Katrina and coined phrases such as “misunderestimation” has a tiny bit more sense than that. At least he is intelligent enough to mess up the economy.
In fairness though, Fall Out Boy reflect the pop-culture mainstream society of today rather well: they have masses of undeserved fans going absolutely nuts for no apparent reason, only because of good marketing. And this is where the problem really lies: artists with no talent receiving unjustified amounts of credit, fame, and money. The part about Fall Out Boy that annoys me is that they’ve done this not by playing pop, but by playing rock — false rock with no heart, guised as creativity under the cloak of extravagant song names and seductive lyrics, that under closer examination become just that: meaningless and contentless text with no value. Maybe someday things will change, maybe someday the heartless record companies will release the iron grip that they have on musicians nowadays, in order to bring out the best of the world, every artist fending for fame by theirselves. Until then, Pete Wentz and Fall Out Boy, go die in a hole.
The biggest philosophical matter ever: the meaning of life, why we’re here, and what purpose we serve. Yet, to such a deep question, there is a simple answer–a chain of thoughts, even–which can explain why this the existence of life is futile.
The essence of life can only be reflected upon in retrospect, as memories of past events. Whilst the events are happening, we are too caught up in the swirl of occurances to make any sense of them. Only upon reflection afterwards do actions and happenings come together in any meaningful way. Therefore, life has to be thought about backwards.
Since the observation of our lives in behindview is the only one which matters, life is only meaningful to those who observe it, and not to those who live it. Thus, life has no value by its own nature, and whatever value it does have exists only in retrospect.
In that case, life becomes completely subjective, making it meaningless: as soon as life is not in memory, it has no purpose. Life has no intrinsic value.
April 14, 2009. Note from Euphorix: I regret the arrogance with which I wrote this article. At the time of writing, I was in the dawn of my interest in religion, and in the wake of this article I have learnt more and advanced intellectually to the point that I no longer agree with the certainty this article was written in. Were I to re-write this, I would word it very differently indeed. Regardless, the article remains in its unedited form.
You must be incredibly stupid to believe in a God. It’s probably not your fault though; you were probably brought up religious and indoctrinated from an early age. You might have been taught that anyone who differs from your opinion is a heathen; that if you dare to differ or question what you are told you will suffer eternal fire in Hell. You have been given the shield of faith, told that you must keep your faith with you always, never letting any heathen’s words of sin reach you, never opening your eyes and seeing the world for yourself but following blindly whatever your priest says. Whatever the pope says. Whatever Imam says, whatever the Qur’an says, whatever the interpretation of theism that you were happened to be born into says.
You are living your life in delusion. You delude yourself that there is a God, there must be a God, otherwise there would be no morals, no reason to live a decent life, no reason to live in the first place. All of this is true, uncomfortable as it is. The harsh reality is that life is just a figment of chance, the right ingredients happened to be here, in the exactly right atmosphere for intelligent beings to develop. The mathematical chance for life is smaller than can be comprehended.
Tell me, why do you not believe in Thor, Zeus, Aphrodite? Had the vikings not been reached by missionaries, had the Greek not been conquered by the Romans and the Romans fallen to the Barbarians, had the word of Jesus died, well, you tell me, would you still be a Christian then?
Why are you forbidding yourself to think through and accept what I am putting forward now? Because if you do, you will go to Hell. You are constantly kept in check and forced to do what you are told by the threat of damnation; merely considering if your religion really does work is a sin worthy of the most extreme punishment. Why? If your religion is the truth, why should it be scared of people doubting it; it should be able to explain its beliefs fully. Something perfectly logical needs not to be hidden away and banned from questioning.
The Vikings used to believe that lightning was caused by Thor riding in a carriage above the sky, throwing Mjølner down to earth, which would bounce right back into his hand. They also believed that one could walk up rainbows and knock on the doors of Valhalla. God was an invention to explain what could not be explained otherwise, and now so many previous beliefs that were held dearly have been eliminated by science, God having to vacate to make room for what could be explained by fact and logic. And where is he now? He is hiding in the few places left: what happened before the big bang, the ontological argument, for example. Incidentally, the ontological argument makes no sense upon closer inspection, as Gaunilo’s island proves. Using the ontological argument, one can make anything at all perfect. Picture a perfect pencil, it must exist because it is perfect. Picture a perfect lizard, a perfect helium balloon, a perfect island. Imagine a perfect layer of plastic covering the earth. It is perfect, and must exist according to the ontological argument, yet we all know that it doesn’t.
Paradoxes in God are plentiful. The following terms of God are claimed to be true by Christians: God is omnipotent, he can do anything. God exists outside of time. God is pure good, and will always do what will lead to the best outcome. This would mean that God has already made every single decision and defined every single course of action ever to take place, since he is omnipotent and exists out of time, and these decisions are for the absolute best, as God is good. This means that God cannot change his mind; that would mean that he is either not pure good or not omnipotent. Take your pick.
Although it may seem so, I am not trying to convince you with this article. I am only asking you to open your eyes, to dare question what you are told, to realize that you have been peppered with religious propaganda since you were born, and it is that which is forcing you neglect what I am saying. Forcing you to neglect logic. Forcing you to live in a world with magic and enchanted fields and cursed plains. I’d like to leave you with this quote from Douglas Adams: “Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”
