(Atheism excerpt)
by
Sean Sinjin
© Copyright 2003, Sean Sinjin.
All rights reserved. Edition 1.2
ISBN 0-9762271-0-X
No
part of this writing may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or
otherwise, without the express written permission of the author.
Meme,
much like our perspective on reality, is an ever-evolving story. Be sure to visit us on the Internet at:
for
revisions, as Meme continuously changes to reflect reality as accurately as
possible.
On a seeming tangent, the border of insanity is reached when the perception of reality degrades to a point where memes are improperly
conjoined without a valid reason for their affiliation; more simply put,
insanity starts when incorrect information is believed to be factual. By this definition, believing in an ethereal entity is insane—no less insane than believing a rabbit rules the universe. If you are one of
those who maintain a faith-based perspective of the world, it may be difficult
to understand or believe that you are insane, but insane beliefs propel an
individual into insanity. Other memes
(factual or not) that you may acquire, can be built upon the incorrect memes of
religious belief, allowing the construction of a large and precarious knowledge
structure in your head that is entirely dependent upon a few incorrect base
memes. Religion propagates insanity.
For example, there are no spirits, ghosts, demons, witches, magic powers, psychics, astrologers, curses, etc. These are nothing
more than fantastical entities and concepts that some misguided humans have
fictitiously conjured up, and they persist even today as the
culturally-propelled extrapolations of our ancient instinctual curiosities to have the unknown explained (e.g., fire,
lightning, thunder, tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, meteors, etc.), and
unrestrained exaggerations of our most primitive fears of predatory creatures (which includes us).
All of these fabrications are the result of grossly
inaccurate interpretations of inexplicable phenomena by the ignorant, or by those who desire the focus of love
that shines on the seemingly wise, and are willing to lie to get it. One must accept
that coincidences happen all the time in nature and that it is ridiculous to
interpret improbable occurrences as some form of divine intervention. Any person
who wittingly claims to have psychic or supernatural abilities, or professes
their affiliation with any form of ethereal being, is simply a fraud, period. There are no
exceptions.
Ultimately, there is no god, or gods, or any other version of a conscious creator, no miracles, no previous life or afterlife or reincarnation, nor has there ever been any of this. All of these concepts have been created by
humankind in the desperate attempt to explain and give purpose to the world
around us; and the proof is already in your head: look under “mythology”. Is it possible to
discredit the beliefs of thousands of other religions, both past and present, and in the same light believe
whole-heartedly in your own version of an all-powerful creator entity?
If your proof is the sheer number of believers in your particular
faith, then you need to know that there isn’t a single religion that represents
more than half the population of the planet, so no matter which religion you subscribe to,
there are more people against it than for it.
If you think that perhaps our religions may be wrong but there at least
must be some conscious entity to have started it all, then your fear of death, judgment, reality, etc. is defeating your logic. Well, something must’ve
started all this? Correct, the Big Bang, which was no more conscious an act than a meteor-strike.
If you still resist, recognize that resistance for what it is: your cognitive dissonance is keeping you ignorant, and insane. But how can so many people be wrong? For the same
reason the Earth isn’t still thought of as flat—humans are continuously evolving the capacity to truly see their world
and the worst thing we can possibly do is to stifle this improving perspective
with oppression and denial. Because of
human nature, new perspectives are intrinsically difficult to digest and are
always met with great resistance, but as many of our heroes of a time past
knew, sometimes being right means standing alone.
What about the afterlife? Reincarnation? Sorry, we all
have to die, and then we are no more.
Every lie you’ve ever been told about an afterlife or rebirth is exactly
that, a lie. There will come a day that
you cease to exist in this universe.
Where did we come from then? Re-read this book
from the beginning. Won’t anarchy reign when people stop believing? Too late; a lot of
people are already unencumbered by the deceptively moral tenets of religion,
despite that they may still have some limited beliefs. Because religion itself is founded on
manipulating with lies, fear, ignorance, and denial, religion therefore is anarchy, for nothing defines anarchy
more than the proliferation of unmitigated nonsense. Feel disappointed with what reality has to
offer? Mother Nature gives only life,
the rest is up to you. Feel vulnerable? Welcome to reality. Feel angry for investing so much into nothing?
You most definitely should.
You may choose to completely object to, resist, and deny everything you have just read.
Rationally, you know all of it to be true. It’s that pit in the back of your mind that
has been there from the very inception of your concept of “faith”—that pit is
“doubt” in the credibility of religion’s root meme: an ethereal entity.
You need to ask yourself, why would a loving and infinitely wise
ethereal creator impishly and perpetually hide from us in order to test our commitment to it? What
does it gain by torturing us with all this confusion and doubt? If faith is its primary test of piety, then
this entity seems to favor the more docile among us, for the very attributes of curiosity that make our
species ever-more intelligent, is contrary to the whole notion of faith. Seems we are to be punished for asking
questions that challenge faith.
This concept of “faith”, however, is remarkably “convenient” as a tool
for religions to be able to maintain their power. What
better mechanism could there possibly be for keeping people subdued than to
implant supernatural fear into their psyches, to the degree that they even fear
questioning anything that religions teach?
Faith is denial and ignorance in disguise, and religion is its
vessel. Stop being a victim. How much more of your
life are you willing to invest in deceiving yourself with the biggest lie in the absolute whole of history?
Clear your mind.
Does
that statement make more sense now?
The truth is, life is awful, when compared to the magical wonderland of
religion. Humankind’s beautifully
evolved intelligence has come at the price of billions of lifetimes spent in
skewed perceptions of realities, pursuing affiliation with gods that never
existed, in a desperate attempt to surmount reality with reason and to seek protection from our primal fears. Religion evolved
to fill this role of a strong parental figure for its members.
So deeply ingrained is our desire for a protector (an extension of the
role our parents played to us in childhood) to save us from the unknown, that even considering the lack thereof can be terrifying.
From the beginning of recorded time, we have
willfully hidden our heads in the sand to avoid the horrible truth: we have no
one to protect us, and we are eventually going to die forever. These fears have allowed religions to
manipulate our perception of reality for eons, enslaving us within a shell of
denial and ignorance in exchange for the artificial relief of the terrors of
reality. Religion provides the placebos of hope, justice, safety, and purpose, when in fact, reality guarantees nothing.
The scales of reality are obscenely shifted to a paradisiacal perspective when viewed through the lenses of religion
and, similar to what a drug-addict would experience, there will be some very painful withdrawal symptoms when those lenses are removed because religion is a
highly addictive and very unhealthy meme drug; a “virtual” narcotic.
Once those religious lenses are removed, however, the damage done to the
mind and body is exposed, and the repair of that damage can begin. Do not believe for a second that all is lost without a god. Most everything that you
may have learned within a religious context will still apply if you just
replace the concept of a god with the concept of you. “Spirituality”, for lack of a better word, is a very real and genuine
need that can be fed from within. If you
want to believe in something, believe in yourself. We are amazing creatures and have every right
to honor and worship ourselves.
The need to worship stems from an instinctual need for communion with something “more” than ourselves. Pursue the communion recourse with your
fellow humans instead and you will find equal if not greater satisfaction of
this need than worshipping a vacant ethereal entity could ever provide. You may also
come to realize that despite your previous efforts at worshipping an external
being, it was indeed yourself that you were worshipping all that time, for these god entities that we worship only really ever existed as an abstract
concept in our minds.
Embrace nature to soften the transition to an atheistic perspective, because nature made us what we are and our
ancient affiliation with it can provide great comfort and meaning at a
“spiritual” level. As well, expect to
deal with fear at first because being godless requires great courage; it redefines what it means to be brave, for virtually all people who lived before us had the illusion of
the afterlife to comfort their minds.
But fear of the unknown, like all fears, will fade in time until once
again life can feel comfortable, but without the need for a god. Stand tall and be free from the addiction to the false allures of religion.
But isn’t religion mostly harmless? Absolutely not. Religion introduces concepts and behaviors
that intercept logic, and replace it with futility, fear, prejudice, and
ignorance. To truly understand atheism
is to understand that anybody with a belief in the ethereal is insane, no matter how slight that belief may be. Once you finally
and truly understand that a belief in any form of ethereal entity is exactly as insane as believing that a
magical rabbit runs the universe, then the walls of tolerance to the waste,
futility, falsehoods, tyranny, hypocrisy, and danger of “harmless” faiths, quickly become transparent.
There can be no practical level of religious tolerance, for any false
information presented can be built upon and exacerbated into a much larger
falsehood with potentially worse consequences.
If our DNA was as faulty and skewed as our H-Freak, we’d all be horribly disfigured.
This argument is not meant to imply that we should
now pursue a course that is the polar opposite of religion. As with any matured societal construct, there
are some aspects to religion that are healthy and beneficial to the species:
religion provides societal order, and also addresses the need of humans to have a structured and
meaningful perception of reality. The thing that all
religions attempt to accomplish but fail at, due to ego-introduced
inappropriate memes, is the careful balancing of everyone’s happiness—not to mention a very long history of needless suffering and death wrought by conflicting religious perspectives (holy wars, genocide, etc.). It’s important
that the portions of religion (or even cultures for that matter) that are lies, be exposed and vanquished in order to limit the people’s
susceptibility to being manipulated by their fears, and liberating them from
the tyrannical dictation of egomaniacal spiritual leaders.
This pursuit of ultimate happiness is what all religions claim to accomplish for its members, but in reality fails in
this cause due to the ease in which any of religions’ tenets can be distorted
to suit whatever agenda is being sought by tyrants, making the prevention of
tyranny nearly impossible. How many
countless examples in history are there of tyrannical acts (e.g., wars,
genocide, etc.) and yet these acts were still found justifiable within a
religious context because those rules suffer from extremely flexible interpretation? The
fluidity of the manufactured perspective that religions fester makes any form
of religion-based leadership a precarious and unpredictable beast, and
therefore exceptionally dangerous when in control of mass power.
Recognizing and extracting only the good qualities,
and removing all that is fiction from religion, would diminish it simply to a
unity of people coming together for positive social interaction; or rather, communion. Religion is simply
communion that has been tyrannized. Life can be equally
beautiful, if not much more so, with a more accurate reality perspective than
one of blind worship. Only with the whole
real truth can we finally live in peace and happiness, since only the true reality perspective can remove the false
prejudices we have towards each other that were created by incorrect religious memes. The beautiful feeling
that many claim to have from a spiritual oneness with a god is the feeling of totality of universal knowledge and union with an entity greater than oneself. This feeling can also be achieved with a
godless reality perspective (to be explained later).
There are many people who would basically agree that
religion is all a lie but who still choose to publicly profess the virtues of faith. These people believe that
religion does more good than harm in adding quality to most people’s lives, saving people from some pains,
maintaining order, and increasing the moral plateau of society. This is denialistic and hypocritical to say the least. All people have the right to know the truth and they deserve the chance to find purpose and happiness within
the context of reality. Virtually all
those who have invested in a religious perspective can be saved from further
wasting of their lives. The wanton ignorance that religion imposes on its members is an
affliction that anyone can overcome.
But isn’t religion an excellent model for teaching
one how to be good to your fellow human? Quite
the opposite, really; it is nearly impossible for those people with a faith in
an ethereal god to ever truly perform a pure act of altruism. In their minds, they
are forever under the watchful eye of their overseer and thus their apparently
genuine acts of altruism are somewhat tainted by the fact that their
motivations stem from the desire to gain the favor of their god. This is no more altruistic than returning
someone’s lost parcel in exchange for a reward.
True altruism is beyond the ability of faith-based people to comprehend
since they can never escape the judgment of their god and hence never have the opportunity
to exercise a rewardless act of altruism.
The religiously endorsed tenet of “love for your fellow human” may
appear to be a generous and altruistic redemption for religion, but is
fundamentally still a selfishly motivated act fueled by increasing favor with a
supreme being.
Let’s attempt to fully justify the need for
vanquishing the religious perspective from our planet. Imagine a perfectly normal rabbit that happens to wander by your home every day. You playfully tell your child that if they
speak nicely to the rabbit, it will add years to her life. Your child approaches the
rabbit and speaks to it for a length of time.
She tells the rabbit many nice things in the hope of making the rabbit
happy so that in exchange, it will extend her lifetime a little more each
time. Every time the rabbit comes by the
home (or another rabbit that looks like the first), the child will indulge in
voracious unidirectional conversation with the rabbit. Many years pass and soon enough the child has
grown into adulthood, but yet still eagerly awaits each arrival of a rabbit in
order to once again converse at it in the selfish pursuit of extending her
life.
This whole routine is nonsense, and has been from
its very inception: the useless
squandering of many, many months’ worth of life in the pursuit of trying to get
magic out of a common rabbit.
How ridiculous this must seem that someone could honestly expect a
reward out of all that conversing with a powerless, confused rabbit. Ridiculous…and wasteful. Do you see where this
is going? The rabbit could have been a
dog, or a tree, or a rock, or…a god. It doesn’t matter because
whatever the chosen object is, all of that effort was for nothing. A misguided suggestion at an innocent age has
lead to an entire life of routinely wasting time and effort in the exhaustive
pursuit of the unattainable. It makes no
more sense to talk to rabbits than it does to worship gods that do not exist,
and that is one major reason why all ethereal entity-based religions need to be
vanquished. As nonsensical as our story
is, if you were to replace the word “rabbit” with the concept of a “god” in our story, you now have billions of people all over the
planet performing this ridiculously wasteful ritual of trying to get magic out
of nothing.
There are hundreds of other reasons why we need to
vanquish the notion of a ethereal being, but most
notably: self-perilous fanaticism, the tyranny of the religious leaders, wars founded on religious beliefs, the mandate of artificial prejudices and barriers imposed by religions against people of varying
attributes (such as ethnicity, race, gender, hair length, etc.), a multitude of
psychological stresses that need not be suffered (e.g., guilt for healthy
self-indulgences like sex, masturbating, etc.), intellectual and educational suppression, etc. The list is as impressive as it is
offensive. The mechanism of denial that has served religion in the past in order to keep out
radical memes, now only serves the purpose of concealing and ignoring the truth, and it must not be allowed to continue to poison the health of
the H-Freak.
Please read “Meme” by Sean Sinjin