Introduction
First, a little about this site. Contrary to what may have been your initial interpretation of the site name, it’s a facetious play on words. Deity. God. Allah. Ganesh. Supreme being. My assertion is that one doesn’t exist. And to know one is simply impossible. Therefore, you can know no deity. There is NO deity. There is no god. In the infinite sea of domain names, all my first picks were (expectedly) taken: nogod, nodiety, godless, knowgod, etc. I wasn’t interested in any of the plethora of available domain suffixes: “.info”, “.net”, “.toaster”, etc. – I specifically wanted a “.com” so there is no confusion that it is a website. Easily referenced. Easily relayed. Admittedly, the settled upon “knowdeity.com” wasn’t a perfect selection, but to be honest, it doesn’t really matter. You got here. The message is the significant, not the wrapper in which it comes.
So, what is this? I have been wrestling with religion for a good chunk of my life. Raised in a Baptist church with a religious mom and silent atheist father. When I say silent, I mean he had no significant input on the topic other than abstaining. Much like most things in my life, I tackled this on my own and at the end of my preteen years, I determined religion was bogus. I don’t think I am special, mind you, but likewise I don’t think you need to be in order to come to the same conclusion I have. You don’t need any privileged education or life experience. I think your average person has all the tools necessary to “see the light” (or lack thereof).
Suspend your emotions and irrational thinking for a little bit. Can you do that? Honestly, try to read this with a hefty dose of logic instead of emotion. I am not personally trying to attack you or your beliefs. I realize that may come across as an empty statement because the truth can sting. People are emotional beings and hearing that you are wrong or things you hold dear are nonsense can cut deep. I want to point out some similarities in other aspects of life we take for granted but for some reason don’t apply to religion. Discuss some hypocrisies and contradictions. Draw some points and lines, and help you connect them all. If you are in quick sand and I throw you a rope, I can’t make you grab it. Sure it takes some work and effort to crawl out, but if you feel like the ever shifting granularity of religion keeps you warm and in place, then ultimately that’s your choice. And ultimately, I can’t say I don’t understand it. I just don’t agree with it when it’s used as justification to hurt other people.
Who’s Number One?
Do you think your favorite sports team is “the best”? That there truly isn’t a “better” team? Not a sports fan? What about the car you drive? Your parents? Your kids? Your pet? Or maybe the city, state, or country you live in? To qualify something as the ONLY option or “single most best”, that’s a major accolade. Sure California sounds like an awesome place, but it does have earthquakes, smog, and a significantly high cost of living compared to say. . . Tennessee. There have been hundreds, even thousands, of gods since the inception of man. Of all the cultures. All the faiths. All the denominations. Do you think your belief system is “the one and only?” The purest truth? All others are wrong? Just in Christianity, there are literally dozens and dozens of carved out perceived truths about our existence and inception on Earth. Baptists, Catholics, Lutherans, Presbyterians . . . the list goes on. As much as Patriot fans have to come to the realization that their team can’t win the super bowl every year, how ego-centric and completely blind it would be to assume your faith is the one and only truth. Never mind the individual hypocrisies per religion, just that one person’s god, his decrees and entire backstory is 100% truth and everyone else’s is fiction. In the NFL, at the end of each season, 31 of 32 teams (or 97%) are reminded their team isn’t the best. For religion, you won’t know until the very end, with no reset button, if your life long devoted belief is real. And it’s a little late then, isn’t it?
Religion for the most part is purely a product of the location you were born. The Earth is only so big. You could have easily been born to a Muslim, Catholic, Jewish, Satanist, or various other family. Religion is just another culture passed down to you from your parents and their parents before them. Much like if you call all carbonated drinks by a regional name like “coke”, “pop”, or “soda”. Most, if not all, of us have childhood memories of believing in fantastical creatures that showered us with candies and presents (all the stuff kids dream of). Santa Claus, Easter Bunny, Great Pumpkin, Tooth Fairy. . . kids being held to a standard so they don’t get put on the “naughty list”. There is a clear parallel from these toy wardens to the adult version (God) that holds eternal life in his bag of goodies. Kids still sneak cookies, lie to their parents, and cheat on tests, just like adults still steal, cheat, and envy things they don’t have. Did Santa *really* have any bearing on life when your parents weren’t around? Why does God?
Maybe you can remember the first time (or the latest time) that you read something off the Internet and then later found out it was a hoax or lie? Fell prey to some facebook meme? Someone links to snopes.com and you realize you were a fool to have believed it as truth. That’s pretty much God. Too bad snopes wasn’t around 2000 years ago. There has been no authority to debunk religion so it just tumbleweeds through time. Stop a second and acknowledge that people once were born, lived believing that that world was FLAT, then died never knowing that falsehood. People actually thought it was ludicrous to think the world was round. Explorers, scholars, and scientists were jailed and even killed for suggesting it. Extrapolate that a minute. . . If people could live in a time where they lived and died believing in a complete falsehood and never knew the truth, why couldn’t that happen now – with religion?
Occam’s razor. The simplest explanation is most likely the most accurate. Your parents laying out Christmas presents while you sleep or a fat man with reindeer traveling the whole globe scaling chimneys and exchanging ipads and trains for cookies and milk? An invisible puppeteer in the sky waiting to give you eternal life with everyone else who has ever died before you or years of evolution and ultra-complex biology?
Remember when you were a kid and someone had the audacity to question whether Santa Claus was real? Preposterous! You may even have been ready to fight to defend the notion that jolly Saint Nick was as real as tooth and nail. (Sounds a lot like some of the most fanatical religious people.) Can you think back to that time when your reality was threatened and you had to go to your older siblings or parents for the truth? Compare the time before you succumbed to the fact it was all make believe and the time when you indulged in fantasy. How is God any different? God (or religion) has been passed down from generation to generation, and the line in time between knowing and not knowing isn’t when you are 8 years old, it is when you are dead. You can’t ask the generation before you that knows for sure because you can no longer communicate with them. It’s the ultimate paradox. To know the truth is too late, so people gamble on the bigger payout (eternity) and subscribe. Just like some kids ask to go back to “believing” in Santa to continue the mysticism and gifts, people have a hard time rationalizing giving up the idea of eternal life.
If you threw a basketball from half court 1000 times, statistically at least one of those shots will go through the basket. And it would probably be an amazing experience. Just like if 1000 people get into a head on collision or battle cancer, there is going to be a percentage that survive or otherwise receive a gratifying, “successful” outcome. Did some omnipotent being hiding in the sky orchestrate it all? No. It just happened. It’s elementary statistics that given enough chances, any odds is going to happen over time. I am sure there have been billions of people that have cursed the heavens during a storm and asked for God to strike them down. That one guy on the front of his boat that gets hit by lightning after muttering the words, that isn’t divine intervention, that is just chance. But we hear about that one roll of the die and not the other bazillion that nothing happens and we say “See! There IS a God!” Seems kinda foolish to cherry pick and ignore all the rest, doesn’t it?
Death is scary
Death. Sit a moment and contemplate what it will be like when you die. Time moves forward without you. Do you remember what happened AFTER you closed your eyes last night and went to sleep? If I asked you what was going on at 4:25pm, you could probably tell me. But what about 4:25am? I am not talking about those nights you wake up in a cold sweat from a nightmare about sitting in math class not prepared for that calculus test you had no idea was coming. I mean those nights you zonk out and seven or eight hours later you wake up. You were out of existence, completely removed from the world, for that period of time. Darkness. The world carried on without you. You had no conscious awareness of the possums outside your window or the stock market opening on the other side of the world. That nothingness is what death is. Try to sit and think about it. What was it really like when you were sleeping. Unconnected. No cognitive activity. Emptiness. No control. No memory. No interaction. It’s a scary prospect. It scares the shit out of me. There is not one person that can avoid it. No one. Not the richest sheik in the world. Not the most intelligent person on the planet. Einstein. Pitt. Hawking. Jobs. Presley. Washington. Trump. Jackson. Cobain. Gates. They all are dead or will be one day. 100%. Guaranteed.
You could probably drive yourself mad thinking about it. Trying to imagine black abyss of nothing. Trying to think about not being here. Not being ANYWHERE. So, a security blanket. Created before you were born. Before your parents. And their parents before them. Heaven. Shiny. Warm. Happy. Now you don’t have to sweat death. Just exist now and don’t worry about the (no) afterlife. Got you covered.
Normandy beach. Can you imagine what hell that was? Mortars and bullets everywhere. Certain death could await you with each ticking minute. Keep your head down. Don’t move. It could all be over in an instant. It’s not much different from “normal life”. Not to trivialize what those soldiers went through by any means, that isn’t my intention. Lives are claimed unexpectantly every day. Car accidents. You can get run over crossing the street or major collision on the expressway on your way to work. Guns. Uber driver Jason Dalton shot up 6 random people he never met who were carrying on mundane life activities. Disease. A mosquito bite can infect you with an agonizing death. Cancer. Your body just turns on you one day and mutating cells start the count down to the end of your existence. Belief in a life after death is a safety net. Keeps people from having to look over their shoulder or be wrapped up in a blanket on their couch.
Religion has a purpose. And I am torn. On one hand, I want to shake people. Why believe in an imaginary being? It’s silly. It’s dumb. And it’s wrong. But on the other hand, I don’t want my friends to have to know the truth. Just like you held your tongue when someone you know still believed in Santa. “Let them enjoy it one more year.” Let them enjoy the fantasy of the tradition. Don’t take that from them. Knowing the truth about Santa was sharing a burden among all the others let in on the secret. Joining the other side of the fence. The passing of innocence of childhood. I don’t wish to inflict that on people I care about. Let them die not knowing there is nothing else on the other side. It won’t hurt them when they are dead. Spare the turmoil of the meaning of life. It’s when using archaic scriptures to shame and maim innocent people that it makes me want to turn the lights on and say “party’s over”.
The realization that God isn’t real is a sad conclusion. Being an atheist isn’t fun. It’s just fact. But seeing the perpetuation of hate/bigotry/violence in the name of an imaginary creation, that’s unconscionable. And as much as I see a value of religion, this reason is enough for me to speak out. To not let you pretend any more. To expend effort to show you that faith in something unreal is fraud. Again.
Pick and Choose
Timothy McVeigh was a rather standup guy, wasn’t he? He was a quiet, intelligent kid in school. He was named “most promising computer programmer” in his senior year at Starpoint Central High. He was raised Catholic and went to church regularly. Often helped his grandmother with chores and work around the house. He was a decorated war veteran receiving almost half a dozen medals including the Bronze Star. And reportedly, he risked limb to save a toddler from walking out into traffic in a visit to Decker, Michigan in 1992. Let’s just choose to not acknowledge that he became a transient obsessed with guns and gambling. He defaulted on a cash advance loan and ended up committing the deadliest act of terrorism on US soil prior to 9-11. He killed 168 and injured over 600 in the Oklahoma City bombing. But we can just look over that part, can’t we? Let’s just focus on the other stuff. He’s a swell guy!
People want to live by the Bible (Koran, Book of Mormon, etc.) and use it to support their intolerance of people from different walks of life. But they only adhere to the parts that are convenient. God hates fags? That’s fine. But what about left handed people? Referenced 25 times in the Bible as an abomination. Shell fish? Mixed Fabrics? Those too! Slaves? Beating your wife? Stoning your disobedient child? Eh, the Bible clearly says it, but let’s just brush those off or spin a weak interpretation to sweep it under the rug. Getting married 4 times and priests molesting innocent kids? God will forgive them. But damn those gays wanting to get married and celebrate their love and devotion to one another. God won’t stand for that!
I am not just picking on Christianity. All religion is bogus. All belief in a supernatural, omnipotent being is misguided. The majority of average people’s core and how they venture through life is based on faith in a higher power. Do some reading on the Mormon faith and their magical underwear, or Hasidic Jews with their Kosher laws and Sabbath rituals. To someone outside that culture, it comes off as fairy tale and pure nonsense. It’s hard not to laugh at the self-inflicted contortions of religion.
Muslims, too. Their definition of adultery is purely male-centric. Does this make sense to you? One of their original commandments forbade male Israelites to have sexual intercourse with the wife of another Israelite (because it obviously negatively affected the other male). Israelite men were *not* forbidden to have sexual intercourse with the slaves belonging to their own household. That was no problem! Sexual intercourse between an Israelite man, even if he was married, and an unmarried or unbetroth woman was not considered as adultery. Adultery only constituted a violation of the husband’s exclusive right to his wife, whereas the wife, as the husband’s possession, had no such right. How messed up is that?
It’s Not That Hard to Be Nice
You don’t need religion to be a good person. You don’t need religion to have morals. Slapping someone in the face hurts. Don’t do that if you don’t want it done to you. Stealing someone’s stuff is bad. If it doesn’t belong to you, it’s not yours to take. You don’t need a manuscript written when people thought the world was FLAT to tell you these things. They also don’t need to tell you other things that contradict common sense. ALL people inherently deserve respect and life free from judgment. Being gay isn’t an one way ticket to hell that should be stopped at all costs. A woman’s body is hers and shouldn’t be legislated by some fat white hairs on Capital Hill. There’s a number of activities that are criminalized and shamed around the globe that frankly shouldn’t be. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. That works. And that’s enough. It’s not that hard to be NICE to your fellow humans.
