These pages
discuss the popular world religions.
I believe in none of them.
Please read the atheism page introduction
for background to this.
Religions
(and here
and here)
(Have you ever studied a religion other than the one you were brought up in?)
Sam Harris
points out that everyone is an atheist about other gods and other religions.
"The faithful do resist the bogus certainties of religion
- when they come from any religion but their own.
Every Christian knows what it is like to find the claims of Muslims to be deeply suspect.
Everyone who is not a Mormon knows at a glance that
Mormonism is an obscenely stupid system of beliefs.
Everyone has rejected an infinite number of spurious claims about God.
The atheist simply rejects one more."
List of deities
-
Isis, Nut, Ra, Osiris,
Zeus, Apollo, Gaia, Poseidon,
Cupid, Janus, Terra, Bacchus, Hercules, Luna, Nemesis,
Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto,
Thor, Odin,
Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, Ganesh, Kali, Krishna,
Baal,
Satan,
Yahweh,
Allah, God
- I don't believe in any of them.
"Now begins the 6th of the 28 stages of meta-generation for
Jessel, the Trifelge Putenard,
Ruler of Kosock and the Outerlands,
destroyer of the Nonsphere ..." Adam Buxton
provides an alternative "Star Wars" commentary for the
inauguration of the
Pope.
If you don't believe in a religion, then pretty much all its solemn ceremonies
look as mad as this.
If you follow a religion, this is roughly how mad your religion looks to atheists and sceptics
(and also to many people from different religions).
From here.
"Theology"
(and here
and here),
unlike every "-ology" in science,
is splintered into
a thousand incompatible camps,
with no findings at all
that are agreed upon by all practitioners.
Clearly the problem is that
unlike every "-ology" in science,
there is no mechanism for proving
something true or false.
One strange consequence of the existence of "theology"
is the idea that scientists are speaking
"outside of their field of expertise"
when they discuss the existence of God.
But who is
qualified to
discuss the existence of God?
Scientists, who study reality
(and philosophers to some extent),
it seems to me.
I see no reason why "theologians" are so qualified.
The Emptiness of Theology
by Richard Dawkins
- "When has theology ever said anything that is demonstrably true and is not obvious?
I have listened to theologians, read them, debated against them. I have never heard any of them
ever say anything of the smallest use, anything that was not either platitudinously obvious
or downright false."
Ophelia Benson on theology:
"theology .. seems to aspire to the condition of a strange combination of story-telling and scholarship. It makes stuff up but uses scholarly-looking language to talk about the stuff it makes up."
Despite there being not a shred of evidence that "Hinduism" is actually true,
there are people who believe so strongly in it
that they are willing to commit the most evil acts a human being can commit.
"They doused him with petrol and taunted him; we could hear him screaming," said Ravindra Nath Prahan, 45, of his paralysed brother, Rasananda, 35, who was burnt alive by Hindu fanatics"
"Kamalini Naik, who was 7 months pregnant, was ordered to denounce Christianity and convert to
Hinduism by a baying mob. When she refused, she and her 1-year-old son were "cut into pieces""
Shame, The Sunday Times, January 21, 2007
- The story of Jasvinder Sanghera and forced marriages among
traditional Sikhs in Britain.
I'm not much of a respecter of "traditional culture".
"Traditional culture" just means
"the stuff your ancestors believed",
back when people knew far less about the world than they do now.
As I have said many times,
the best thing most people in the non-western world can do is
abandon the culture and beliefs of your ancestors, as I have,
and adopt something better.
Jasvinder Sanghera
is eloquent on how PC westerners fail to stand up for the victims
of traditional cultures:
"We're in denial about this even being an issue.
But we have to start seeing this as a UK problem.
This PC culture we have created here is a nightmare.
Forced marriage isn't an issue of cultural understanding.
It's about people abusing other people. So why not face facts?
We know forced marriage happens across a number of communities,
but the figures tell us they are predominantly south Asian, so let's not get all PC about things.
It doesn't help."
The Jehovah's Witnesses
have for a long time prophesised the
imminent
end of the world,
putting ever-increasing dates on it when the year comes round and of course nothing happens.
Their beliefs may be as strange as any others, but I could forgive the Mormons a lot
because of all the work they do on the world's genealogy.
What a marvellously useful religious belief, that one should try to account for the whole world.
None has been able to persuade the whole world of its truth (or even a majority of the world).
We often focus on the large number of believers in a religion,
and forget about the much larger number of people who don't believe it.
4 billion people don't believe in Christianity.
5 billion people don't believe in Islam.
Science is not like this.
Science has prestige with everybody.
Religion only has prestige with those who believe that religion.
Tribal creation myths and polytheism have little prestige
among Christians.
Christians rarely realise that their myths look like that to atheists.
The power of science's prestige is illustrated by the fact that
a number of irrational, unscientific religions
have tried to add "science" to their name:
Doesn't the sheer number of elaborate and contradictory belief systems
on this page
tell you something?
Even just within Christianity alone,
what would Christ make of this mess?
Surely it is obvious that all these religions are human inventions,
floating along without any standards of evidence that might knit them together.
Worldwide percentage of Adherents by Religion.
Stats from here.
See also
here
and
here.
Pie chart generated with
piecolor.com.
Since 1995.
