Religion

Man is kind enough when he's not excited by religion,

but once the holy holies have got a grip on him he's capable of almost anything. When a disciple from the wildcat religious asylum comes marching forth, get under the bed. It doesn't matter whether he's a Christian, Hindu, Jew or Muslim. If he's made up his mind that you need reforming, he will do it with anything handy - an ax, 800 years of witch burning or, if necessary, he'll blow you up."           
- Mark Twain 

PAGE TABLE OF CONTENTS 
- Imagine There's No Heaven
- Biblical References
- The Religious Experience
- Does God Exist?

Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Steven_Weinberg



Imagine there's no heaven? According to religious scholar Bart Erhman neither the Old Testament nor Jesus taught that there was a heaven or a hell. He has shared nearly 200 YouTube videos on this and similar topics, Heaven or Hell: A histoty of the Afterlife - An Interview by Terry Gross. 

     The mission of this website is to emphasize the importance of relying on real evidence as confirmed through critical thought.

     We can't provide support for anyone's religious beliefs.  If there were evidence for your religion, it would be FACT (aka science) and not religion.

     The question we ponder is, "Is religion even necessary?"

     For many people the answer is an unqualified "No, it is not necessary."  As Weinberg states, "Good people will do good things and evil people will do evil things without religion."

     However, we aren't that idealistic.  To fall in line, many people need "the whip and the carrot" by a judge from whom they can't hide.  So our goal with this website is to "discourage good people from doing evil" in the name of religion.

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BIBLICAL REFERENCES

Click on the following icons to go to two other excellent websites for studying religious beliefs.



The following links focus on "non-belief. " With radio and TV station blasting out 24/7 arguments for "belief," that thought hardly needs additional comment.   
  
    The Bible is the most read book of any kind and in varying degrees of acceptance is the basis of the most popular religion on earth, Christianity. Some denominations consider it to be primarily inspirational and a moral guideline. Others consider it as the literal unerring word of God. The History of the Bible: How it Came to Us provides one of the best summaries of its 3000 year history.
     The Skeptics Annotated Bible (SAB) provides a very thorough reading of the Bible with a quite different perspective. According to SAB, "Anyone who has struggled through the Bible knows it is not an easy book to read. Those that begin reading at Genesis seldom make it through Leviticus and the few that survive to the bitter end of Revelation must continually face a disturbing dilemma: their faith tells them they should read the Bible, but by reading the Bible they endanger their faith."
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RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

Although an ex-Catholic nun and distinguished scholar of Islam, Karen Armstrong's belief in God in not mainstream. "I believe in holiness and sacredness in other people. It doesn’t mean that the clouds part and I see God. That’s a juvenile way of thinking about it. We need to rediscover what is in our religions, which has gotten overlaid with generations of egotistical and lazy theology. The current thinking – my God is better than your God is highly irreligious."
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Raising Kids Without Religion is a soft way to ease into the concept that morality should be based on doing what feels good and just rather out of fear of some higher authority. Deborah Mitchell was raised Catholic but moved away from religion in her early 20s. She says that she doesn't go to church and doesn’t even really believe in God. She's a mother of two teenagers in Texas who feels “immersed in Christianity,” and started a her blog because she felt frustrated and marginalized. She didn’t want to feel so alone.
<Click to visit her blog>


Fanaticism is the subversion of a belief structure for personal advantage and to the detriment of another. No magic "lines in the sand" mark one's steps before evangelical becomes fanatical.  Promote beliefs so as to diminish the worth or value of another is fanaticism. A free expression of ideas assumes all participants have equal credulity.
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DOES GOD EXIST?

Does God or do Gods exist? This question has be hypothesized for millennia.  The answer usually depends on who is asking the question and what he or she wants the answer to be.  Initially, the the effort was to prove the existence of a god and more recently the search has been broaden to accept that god may not exist.
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Robert G Ingersoll (1833 – 1899) was an orator during the Golden Age of Freethought and is noted for his broad range of culture and his defense of agnosticism. He was nicknamed "The Great Agnostic."
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The Trinity of God is a fundamental belief of Catholics, Protestants, and derivative Christian sects. It was never a religious teaching.  It was established by political edict by Emperor Theodosius—who himself had been baptized only a year before convening the Council of Constantine in 381AD. Theodosius, who had no theological background of his own, put it in place to silence a huge debate. He proclaimed 
Let us believe the one deity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, in equal majesty and in a holy Trinity. We authorize the followers of this law to assume the title of Catholic Christians; but as for the others, since,in our judgement, they are foolish madmen, we decree that they shall be branded with the ignominious name of heretics, and shall not presume to give their conventicles the name of churches.
https://www.ucg.org/bible-study-tools/booklets/is-god-a-trinity/the-surprising-origins-of-the-trinity-doctrine 

It got written into the Bible thanks to the New Testament of Erasmus. Its appearance in late Greek manuscripts is based on the fact that Erasmus was placed under ecclesiastical pressure to include it in his Greek New Testament of 1522, having omitted it in his two earlier editions of 1516 and 1519 because he could not find any Greek manuscripts which contained it”

https://www.ucg.org/bible-study-tools/booklets/is-god-a-trinity/a-spurious-reference-to-the-trinity-added-in-1-john-5-7


Did Jesus exist?  Almost everyone would say yes he did.  However, these same people would also be ignorant of the fact that no independent evidence exists for Jesus. Check out what religious historian Richard Carrier suggests.