Avris

i took this picture exactly 12 years ago, early in the morning, at lake garda in italy. it's a very special photo for me – it marks a day i now consider the first day of my new life ️

Recently, I'm getting approached online by people trying to pick a fight about religion and about how terrible I am for not being a fan (to put it mildly). Which surprised me quite a bit, since I honestly don't remember the last time religion was even properly on my mind, let alone having brought up this topic publicly.

If you’re saying that “faith doesn’t require evidence, otherwise it wouldn’t be faith”, you don’t sound smart.

Rather, you are admitting to the very thing I’m accusing faith of being: out of touch with reality, reason and facts.

Good job!

I get that a lot: “oh, you’re gay, you demand tolerance, but you told me that my god is a mythology and that’s soooo intolerant of you blah blah...”

Well, let me tell you how is sexual orientation different from believing in Santa Claus, and why tolerance has nothing to do with it.

Religious people often threaten atheists with what will happen to them after death, if they don’t convert. Yeah, cause out of all the different made-up stories about what happens after death, it’s specifically yours that’s gonna be the right one. Right...

Let’s revert that question into “what if you’re wasting your life on religious bullshit”. It’s not as scary, because if it’s the case, you won’t notice you were wrong (that’s how being dead works). Still, your current life is the only one that you know for sure you’re gonna get. Are you really willing to waste it?

Say you’ve found a host lying on a street. Is there any way whatsoever to determine, whether it’s still just a bread, or maybe it’s already transformed into god in person?

It’s possible to determine, which floor was used to bake it, more or less when did it happen, how much smog have settled on it in the meanwhile. If we really try, we can figure out practically it’s whole history – but it’s impossible to say, if it’s entire nature changed drastically? That means just one thing: no, it didn’t change.

If a body A and a body B are totally indistinguishable from each other (whether physically or “spiritually”), then A = B. God’s not in that bread. Transsubstantiation is a myth.

I’m a bit annoyed when somebody tries to convert me to their faith. Because although I know they probably do it for good reasons, wanting to give me a gift of eternal salvation and all that crap, from a perspective of a person that has spent (way too) much time getting to know religions of the world, the fact that god doesn’t exist is so obvious, and the absurdity of religions is so immense, that there’s no way back for me. It’s a waste of time to even look at it.

I have, however, found a way to spare myself all that conversional boredom. Ready?

From a scientific point of view, of course I care for the god hypothesis. Its existence and nature are facts about our universe that are definitely worth knowing. But since we have absolutely no hard evidence supporting the existence of any god, anything we say about it and its nature must be either an uneducated guess, or just shamelessly made up.

From my personal perspective, however, should I care about god at all? Would it change anything in my life? Would I become a better person, if I just started believing against all reason?

As much as I love Cohen’s Hallelujah, there’s one verse that always bothered me. “Your faith was strong, but you needed proof”. Seriously? It’s not how those words work!

If you require proof or evidence to believe in something, it’s called common sense, not faith.

If you accepted some fact after being presented evidence for it, it’s called knowledge.

If you believe in something despite the lack of evidence, that’s faith.

It’s not that hard to get those words right.