If a title is important, then we are atheists. However, this site is not dedicated to atheism per se. Our attitude to the world around is not determined in terms of believing or not believing in God. This is rather “I know” - “I don’t know” and “I think” - “I don’t think” -kind of interaction with it. In general, falling into any particular group of people might have negative consequences, even if this group can be characterized in positive terms. Belonging to atheists automatically gives believers the ground to claim that we are simply another sect or even religion on its own simply with other gods and objects of worshipping. Our god in this case might be knowledge and technical progress, and we pray to science, or something like that.
Another problem with the atheism is that it does not deny faith as such, but only belief in the supernatural. The need to believe at least in something is associated with the danger of ending up otherwise in the ranks of nihilists, who are considered to be not very good crowd.
But we really are cruel enough not to believe in anything and not only in the existence of God, but also in all other things that might imply such an attitude. We are absolutely certain that any phenomenon of the surrounding world does not require to be believed in but can be rather understood and explained, and if there is something that we cannot explain, this does not mean that this phenomenon has a divine origin, but only that we have not yet accumulated enough knowledge about it. This is what science does and you don’t need to believe in it, because science itself is built on doubt and is always in the process of proving its rightness. If science is wrong, then it admits it, because making mistakes is an integral part of science in the first place.
There is no point in arguing with believers about whether the God exists, and if he exists, why he refuses to make sure that there is peace on earth and everyone is happy. People believe in God not because there is some inescapable need to do so, but almost exclusively because they are born into families of believers, and get the faith passed to them with their mother’s milk. Moreover, their faith is always strictly inherited from their parents so that protestants do not produce Islamists, just as Buddhists do not produce Catholics. There are exceptions of course, but they are quite rare. The same rule applies for any other group of people: your own group always seems better than someone else’s. If, due to circumstances, you suddenly find yourself in another group, then that other group now becomes yours, and the former one becomes a stranger. It’s quite primitive, but what can you do, that’s how it goes.
Arguing about the existence of gods is like arguing about the existence of deep-sea guinea pigs or space elephants. No one has ever seen any of them. However, the likelihood of, say, space elephants seem to be somewhat higher due to the fact that we at least can imagine elephants, but in the case of gods, it is completely unclear the existence of what exactly we are talking about. God is not directly characterized in the Bible. All that is known about him is that he prefers Jews to other people, fiercely hates Marduk, and has a feebleness for the roasted meat aroma. What is it exactly, how does it work, where and why did it come from – are the questions the mere posing of which would result in immediate burning at the stake. The absolute vagueness of God from the point of view of common sense creates insurmountable semantic problems when trying to discuss matters related to him. The word “existence” itself comes from the word essence, but in the case of God, this is so vague that the question of what exactly can or cannot exist is devoid of any practical meaning.
In the same context, it remains unclear what exactly people believe in. What is this, belief in a miracle, hope for an afterlife, or simply the need to follow tradition? Sometimes people convert to faith being impressed by great upheavals. For example, after a happy recovery from a seemingly incurable illness or after surviving a serious accident. This is where the lack of critical thinking comes into play, because luck is not a heavens gift, but just a matter of statistical probability, which can always be assessed and calculated. Whatever happens in your daily life, there is a probability of a particular chain of events. For example, a climber is much more likely to fall to his death than an aquarium fish lover, but the risk of falling increases only when the climber is climbing a mountain. Statistics tell us that with any given number of climbers, a certain percentage of them will inevitably fall down if enough time is given to play out the stats. You can make it more complicated by introducing an index of climber's sinfulness and monitor how it affects their mortality rate, but most likely there will be no deviations from the average. By the way, an aquarium fish lover, in turn, always has a chance of drowning in an aquarium, provided it is deep enough.
So, faith is the belief in the reality of something whose existence cannot be proven. To us it is inappropriate and instead of “faith” we use the word “confidence”. Confidence, or rather the level of confidence, is determined by the amount of available information. The more information we receive, the stronger our confidence becomes. At certain point the confidence can grow into certainty and even become a fact. Again, it all depends on the amount of information.
Richard Dawkins once told a story about his arguments with some monk during one of his airplane trips. The dispute was about the coexistence of humans and dinosaurs, the impossibility of which Richard defended. His opponent could not understand what actually was the problem with that. To Dawkins's remark “But they died out 60,000 years ago!”, he replied: “What makes you think that they really all died out? Maybe some still exist in places where they are very difficult to spot, in the jungle, for example!". This funny episode is actually a clear example of the lack of critical thinking that many, if not all, believers are prone to.
One of the major stumbling blocks in disputes with believers is the origin of life. The version of a divine designer is defended by bringing forth the examples of some very complex systems. For example, eyes. This argument lies in the seeming impossibility to imagine how such an incredibly complex object as the eye could arise on its own, in the process of some kind of mutations and natural selection. The ridiculousness of such a position is not even in the lack of knowledge and imagination, but in the illogicality of the very formulation of the question. A believer, for a reason that is difficult to grasp, takes it for granted that the instant appearance of an eye out of nowhere, on the first week of creation, improvised by some unimaginable but omnipotent and omnipresent being is more likely than its gradual evolution over millions of years in strict accordance with the laws of chemistry and physics.
Another controversial point is the rejection of the origin of man from the monkey. In fact, the science never really claimed that man descended from a monkey, but only points out that man is actually a monkey, only a very self-confident one, and is sharing with other species of monkeys a common ancestor.
It is also unclear why religious people believe in miracles. After all, no one has ever witnessed a single miracle. A miracle, by definition, is the manifestation of something impossible, and precisely because of its impossibility, it never manifests itself, and if it does it just means that it was not impossible and, therefore, is not a miracle.
We have been around long enough to figure out that religion is not making this world a better place. As with any other religion information about Christianity is contained only in the scriptures (Bible in this case). In order to understand the motives of 21st century's grownups who are using this book as a guide in evaluation reality and making judgments on good and evil we had to read it ourselves. Currently we are still very far from finishing our work but the features of the ancient god Yahveh, whom all Christians started to address later simply as "God", are becoming more transparent. While reading the book we are getting more and more amazed by the level of cruelty and primitivism of the events it has documented. We couldn't help but started questioning the whole biblical story and ideas behind it. Some of them sound like this:
- Why people are so dependent in their moral judgements? Why the ample information that fills the world around us is not enough to make the right choices? Why do we always need guidelines for even the most basic concepts like killing, stealing, raping etc.?
- Why we dare not to admin that it is us who decide our own fate? Why do we outsource this duty to some imaginary figures invented by ignorant and uneducated shepherds thousands of years ago?
- What makes us certain that we would stop killing, stealing and raping only if we convince ourselves that this deity exists and why we keep killing, stealing and raping after convincing ourselves that he will pardon us for doing it?
- Why the plethora of proof for his non-existence we pronounce as his existence ultimate proof?
- Why are we entering buildings filled with candles, golden chains and colorful pictures and after throwing ourselves down on our knees, start mumbling some crap, looking at the piece of wood with some paint on it?
- Why are we honoring the book written by people whom we do not understand, despise, afraid of and always want to revenge for something?
Thousands of years ago the humanity could put forth its young age as an excuse for believing in fairytales of religion but now it is 21st century! What is wrong with us? Why are we still locked in this imaginary world of holy spirits talking out of smoking bushes? Why in order to understand that it is bad to kill we need to wait until some old Jew would bring from a mountain some stones with instructions engraved on them?
Coming back to our website and its goals: indeed, we do not participate in the atheist movement, just as we do not participate in any other movement. Our task is just to show the lack of common sense in many human endeavors, be it wars, politics or religion itself, and what we are mainly engaged in the fighting against is stupidity.
If you are interested in this approach to life, you are very welcome here! Please send an email to the admin and we will contact you. We apologize in advance for the complexity of the registration procedure, but this is due to the nature of the issues that we are addressing: the risk of getting another religious bully is always very high, so additional questioning cannot be avoided.