Why I rejected Religion

BY
Steeve Cooper
[Excerpts from The Rewards of being an Atheist published in The Australian Atheist of December, 2004 are given below.]

The following are some of the realisations which made me finally and totally abandon the notion of Christianity and its God.

1 .The Bible is a faulty source of knowledge. It contains hundreds of serious contraditons, scientific impossibilities, immoralities, absurdities, unfulfilled promises, inaccuracies and obscenities. Here is just one example. The Bible states that God cannot lie. Num 23:19 . Prov. 12:22. Heb. 6:18. It also states that God sends lying spirits, 2 Thess 2:11. 1 Kings 22:23. So we learn thatGod does lie by proxy.

2. The basis of Christian thought is that Jesus died a substitutional death for the sins of mankind, ‘thus cleansing them from all sin.’ It is unjust to charge an innocent person with the crimes of someone else. Equally, it is a travesty of justice to attribute the virtue of someone else to a guilty person. Yet this is the Christian doctrine, which sprang from the ancient Hebrew belief, in animal sacrifices for the sins of the people. It is convoluted ancient Hebrew reasoning unworthy of intelligent human beings.

3. The Christian religion relies on unprovable propositions:

a) that there is a supreme creator God;

b)a human person has an eternal soul;

c) the memory and guilts of this life can be transferred to another existence.

When there, the sins of mankind may be punished in a never-ending hell-fire. So the whole basis of Christianity is unscientific ancient superstitions and colossal cruelty.

4. The Christian religion diminishes human dinity by dependence on an unscientific myth. It tends to rob a person of the most important asset of self-esteem or self-worth by regarding him/her to be unworthy by him/herself. In its plae it offers borrowed virtue. It must first convince a person of unworthiness before offering the supposed imputed virtue of Jesus. The religion denies that human virtue is purely a human quality and a facet of our innate social nature. Religion always encourages dependence on a divine instead of human potential.

5. The Christian religion is an elitist anti-social doctrine equal to tribalistic racism. It divides people into believers or the damned. Its history is full of cruelty, wars and suffering. Christians, Jews, Muslims all worship the same God. Not only have they killed each other, they fight their own kind in the name of the same God. Millions have died because of belief in God. The American psychologist Dr. Eric Fromm said:

“There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as the moral indignation which permits anger, envy and hatred to be acted out under the guise of virtue.”

This cerainly applies to the Christian religion.

6. The Christian faith is founded on two basic beliefs. The first is that an almighty god does indeed exist; that he must be obeyed and worshipped before he will bestow his favours upon his supplicants. The second basic belief is that the spirit of mankind lives on after death, that there is another rewarding life beyond the grave.

These two basic notions stand together. If either god or life after death is not true, the whole structure of religion must collapse. Yet there is absolutely no scientific proof that either assumption is true. This is scary stuff! These two beliefs have been accepted by hundreds of billions of people for thousands of years. But that does not make those conclusions true.

conflict, I automatically became a humanist. We are all social animals who enjoy the company of other social animals. It is part of our innate natural heritage and becomes easy for us to show compassion, be honest with each other, tolerant and friendly to all people and gain approval by obeying the laws of the country.

Herre are some rewards for being an atheist:

An atheist becomes a peson of worth in his or her own right. There is no place for any borrowed pseudo-virtue.

He or she becomes king or queen of his or her own life and part of the social community.

One is not accountable to priests or any religious leader.

One acquires intellectual and emotional freedom, lack of guilt and no fear of death.

One gains personal honesty and freedom as a complete human being free from inner conflicting opinions.

A person believes in one’s own virtue, gaining personal maturity and integrity.

It is a way of living a socially, acceptable life in harmony with other human beings about us.

One looks to science and common sense reason to answer uncertainties.

When I was rid of religious.