Leaning over the edge. Give it all you've got.

What I need from you is to pour it on me and tell me why it's foolish to believe in God.

It depends on your perspective, some people do need the comfort and reassurances that comes from religion in order to get through life and cope with the fear of mortality, while others (myself included) dont need such a belief in order to get through life. Reality is harsh, cold, uncaring, and merciless. There is no such thing as fairness, good, evil, justice, or compassion. It just is. To quote Carl Sagan: "The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." By taking off the rose colored glasses of dogma one is forced to face this fact and face it alone, to stare at one's mortality strait on and march toward it. To avoid this harsh reality many use religion as a safety blanket, to tell themselves its ok to die because you get to start over fresh free of all troubles and pains associated with life. It allows one to ignore their guilt and actions with the concept of redemption and atonement. It allows one to relinquish accountability for any action and live in bliss. However once you begin to see the errors in this mentality, the cracks in the code you're forced to make the choice seen in the Matrix, do you take the Blue pill and ignore the glitches and keep living in fantasy, or take the Red pill and face reality for what it is and try to make the best of it?

If you want the Blue pill then stop reading.

If you want the Red pill then I will explain what leads me to reject the concept of god.

By understanding evolution one can see that Humans are really no different than animals. We share much of the same DNA and origin, the branch we traveled on just so happened to develop cognizant abilities to the point where we achieved self-awareness. But even that really isn't all that amazing as our brains are really just highly tuned prediction machines used to prolong our survival in a multitude of environments. Our purpose is to survive and pass our genes on, the same as any other lifeform, our cognizance is just a means to that end. However our self-awareness comes with some side-effects in the form of ego, which can help us survive, but also blind us with delusions of our own importance. We think we are super special and unique, so much so that we possess something no other life form does: a soul. And even more so that reality itself was created for our sole enjoyment as a testing ground so that we can move on to another realm created just for us, because we are so special.

Now lets look at that last part. If you look at the shear magnitude of the known cosmos we are insignificant, actually even that is giving us more significance than we actually have. The universe is at least almost 14 Billion years old, our Planet is only around 4 Billion, and our species is around a couple of hundred thousand years old, only a few tens of thousands of years worth of language. So here you have this infantile species barley old enough to think, living and dieing on a spec of dust, orbiting a tiny explosion (star), residing in the outer rim of a small galaxy, out in the fringes of the universe, but we are the most important thing in existence and it was all made for us? If you want hubris that is the very definition. We are like a spore of mold growing in colonies on a loaf of bread on a deserted island, and even that is giving more significance. So why are humans over any other life form so special that everything else was created for us? If this is the case then why are we at the mercy of the elements? Why is literally everything else trying to kill us? For a universe designed for us it appears to be more of a death trap than a habitat. The more logical reason is we are just another life form trying to survive and outlive everything else while we can. While this can be scary I find it invigorating, it means we are free to live how we see fit and live toward whatever goal or purpose we desire. There is no right or wrong way to live. As long as you are happy then that is what counts.

/r/exchristian Thread