Why do Americans believe in God despite all the evidence?????

[BlondewithaBrain]

The invention of God was the humans first attempt of Philosophy. It was the original attempt to try to understand where the universe came from and how we got here. Today, we now know far more through evidence of the origins of the universe and how we got here. Our own DNA provides evidence that we ALL originated from Africa. This in one way defeats racism and also creationism.

Professor Weinberg's book the first three minutes of the big bang plus work from Stephen Hawking on time and space along with other great physicists has made the scientific world pretty much certain that the big bang was not some great plan to ensure that we are all here today. I'm pretty certain that the big bang was not created so we could be talking online today or you would suffer a flat tyre on the way to work. Are you really so ignorant or is the word arrogant that the big bang was all done just so you could be here and tested? The universe is still growing. Earth is the size of one particle in the sahara dessert. We are irrelevant. Evolution is a billion year project.

Religion poisons our society. It divides us and it allows us to lie to each other as people. We continue to have people fooling us that we surrender to wishful thinking. We dont enquire or use evidence to survive and prosper. Cancer is not a disease given by God its a living organism that uses our body as a host. The most recent attack from the religious groups was stem cell research. There is also the offensive attack from religious groups who say where would your morality be if there was no God? People do not rape, steal or murder people because they believe in a divine power. The religious tribe say what about stalin he didnt believe in God, but Russia is one of the most religious countries in the world and the people are extremely superstitous. Stalin used the social fabric for his own purposes and tried to replace the virgin mary as an icon. Hence the pictures of dictators you see. Just like Jesus Christ. We as outsiders can see the delusion, but the people who worship stalin and jesus in their icons cannot. Dictators prospered in societies where education was weak and religion strong.

Religion also goes against everything Americans value; the idea to be a free people. Religious people in some sharpe of form are surrending themselves to a higher power wishing for them to be slaves. They say they serve God and Jesus Christ and follow the bible but in fact they have an innate desire to be told what to do. Brutal leaders have used this to prosper and build empires.

People who believe in God have a desire to be slaves. Do you really believe that high above you there is a celestrial body watching over you since the day you were born, following your every movements, could provoke your mind by telling you what decision to make when uncertain. Tell me is this the absolute definition of dictatorship. Do you really believe the big bang was the purpose of watching and following you to ensure you were a good boy/girl?

[BlondewithaBrain]

Well even ignoring the content of your rant...only Americans believe in God?

care to debate anything that was written. or did the word god create your spam response.

[BlondewithaBrain]

I just wrote a very long reply whch was not posted as i got timed out so ill write it later again as im not going through everything said all over again. but i will reply. just have to type it quicker and not think.

[BlondewithaBrain]

Where is the source of faith?
Well, here’s how religion has this effect, in my opinion: it is derived from the childhood of our species, from the bawling, fearful period of infancy. It comes from the time when we did not know that we lived on an orb; we thought we lived on a disc. And we did not know that we went around the sun or that the sky was not a dome; when we didn’t know that there was a germ theory to explain disease, and innumerable theories for the explanation of things like famine. It comes from a time when we had no good answers, but because we are pattern-seeking animals (a good thing about us), and because we will prefer even a conspiracy theory or a junk theory to no theory at all (a bad thing about us). This is and was our first attempt of philosophy, just as in some ways, it was our first attempt at science, and it was all founded on and remains founded on a complete misapprehension about the origins, first of the universe, and second, about human nature.

Regarding religious people wishing to be slaves. Case Study North Korea
North Korea is the most religious state in the world. I wondered, what would it be like praising God and thanking him all day and all night? Well, look at North Korea, it is a completely worshipful state. It's set up only to do that, for adoration and it’s only one short of a trinity. They have a father and the son, as you know, the Dear Leader and the Great Leader. The father is still the president of the country. He’s been dead for fifteen years, but Kim Jong-il, the little one, is only the head of the party and the Army. His father is still the president, head of the state. Now circumstances have since changed maybe he will be the holy ghost? but in theory what you have in North Korea is what you might call a necrocracy or what I also called them thanatocracy. One—just one short of a trinity: father, son, maybe no holy ghost - give it a few weeks, but they do say that when the birth of the younger one took place, the birds of Korea sang in Korean to mark the occasion. This I’ve checked. It did not happen. Take my word for it. It didn't occur and I suppose I should add they don’t threaten to follow you after you're dead. You can leave North Korea. You can get out of their hell and their paradise by dying. Out of the Christian and Muslim one, you cannot. This is the wish to be a slave. And in my view, it’s poisonous of human relations.

[BlondewithaBrain]

The arguement that religious people do good things
Now some people say that some religious people have done great things and have been motivated to do so by their faith. The most cited case in point I have found is Martin Luther King, who I know I don’t need to explain to you about.

Two points though: first, he was it’s true a minister. He did preach the Book of Exodus, the exile of an enslaved and oppressed people as his metaphor. But if he really meant it, he would have said that the oppressed people, as the Book of Exodus finds them doing, were entitled to kill anyone who stood on their way and take their land, their property, enslave their women, kill their children, and commit genocide, rape, ethnic cleansing and forcible theft of land. That’s what the Book of Exodus described happening, the full destruction of the tribes. It's very fortunate that King only meant the Bible at the most to be used as a metaphor and after all he was using the only book that he could be sure all of his audience had ever really read.

The second is, during his lifetime, he was attacked all the time for having too many secular and leftist and non-believing friends, the people like famous black secularists and others, the men that actually did organize the march on Washington.

The question religious people struggle to answer
Here is my challenge: you have to name me an ethical statement that was made or a moral action that was performed by a religious person in the name of faith that could not have been made as an action or uttered as a statement by a person not of faith, a person of no faith.

You have to do that. No one's been able to find me that. That being the case, we're entitled to say, I think, that religious faith serve as the requirements whereas if I was to ask , "Think of a wicked thing said or an evil thing done by a person of faith in the name of faith," no one would have a second of hesitation in thinking of one, would they?

[BlondewithaBrain]

Religious people suggests society has morals and ethics because of religion

Here is a scenario; You are to imagine that you’re in a town late at night where you've never been before, and you have no friends and it’s getting dark. And through the darkness, you see coming towards you a group of men, let’s say ten. Do you feel better or worse if you know that they’re just coming from a prayer meeting? The classic tale from a religious person

Well the answer is simple, go to belfast, jerusalem, kabul, bombay, tehran and baghdad. The answer is run.

It is for the people of faith to prove that god exists

it is those who are people of faith who have the explaining to do, who have the justifying to do. If they can't account for anything about the origin of our cosmos or our species, if they say that without them, we’d be without morals and make us seem as if we are merely animals without faith, if further, everybody can name an instance where religion has made people actually behave worse to one another and act as a retardant upon the advances of knowledge and science and information, I submit that the case to be made is theirs rather than mine. And we have a better tradition. We’re not just arid secularists and materialists, we on the atheist side. Religion changes the rules to fit the time and its agenda. We never have.

Evidence to show religious people why it is unamerican to believe in God
We can point, through the Hubble telescope, the fantastic, awe-inspiring majestic pictures that are being taken now of the outer limits of our universe, and who’s going to turn away from those pictures and start gaping again at the burning bush? We have smaller microscopes that can examine for us the miracles of the interior of the double helix and the sheer beauty of that. The natural world is wonderful enough, more wonderful than anything conjured by the fools who believe in astrology or the supernatural. And we have a better tradition politically against the popes and the imams and the witch doctors and the divine right of kings and the whole long tradition of civic repression combined with religion that's known as theocracy.

We have created in the United States, the only country in the history of the world written on founding documents testable, organized, works in progress based on the theory of human liberation and the only constitution in the history of world that says that there shall be a separation between the church and the state. God is never mentioned in the United States Constitution except in order to limit religion and keep it out of politics and put it under legal control. This achievement was described by President Jefferson. People forget what it used to be like, see how the Christians loved each other, how they've tried to repeat the European pattern of one religious sect repressing and torturing another one. And as you probably know, the president wrote back and said, “No, you may be assured that there will ever be in this country a wall of separation between the church and the state.” So I have a new slogan and take it with you and it goes like this, “Mr. Jefferson, build up that wall.”

[BlondewithaBrain]

"Wall of Separation" does not mean that belief in itself is outlawed or "unAmerican". The people who usually call things unAmerican are fascists and paranoid authoritarians.

You know who some of the first people to have religious freedom in the colonies were? Quakers of all people.  

Well, in the United States, you have the most advanced, wealthy, most powerful nation in probably the history of the world, and you have probably the most freedom-loving, you know, almost inventing—not inventing but really espousing the philosophy of freedom and individuality and trying to, you know, propagate that throughout the world. Yet, you also have the most religious nation. Well, it's true. I mean, you can argue with the methods but I mean, there's no question that, like, we are trying to promote democracy. And yet you have, the most religious nation. You have like people going to church is probably an all-time high. Religious people affect who are leaders are, you know, to a great degree. People can say there is a contradiction which i tried to point out in the origins of the post.

So heres a notion for you the section of the constitution means you can have religious pluralism. Now for example where I come from, originally (you can probably tell I was born in England), the head of the church is the head of the state and the head of the armed forces. It's an official church and you have to pay for it and whether you want to or not. And on the moment that Her Majesty the Queen expires, the head of the Church of England will become a bat-eared half-Muslim with no taste in women as far as I can see, the lugubrious Prince Charles, who goes to classes on Islam and talks to plants and is a loon. That’s what you get for founding a church on the family values of Henry VIII.

In the United States, you can't have any of that. That'd be completely unconstitutional. You can belong to any church you want, the government has nothing to do with that. And people I think take a Toquevillian view, if you like, of the church. They go, many of them, to church for social reasons. Some of them for ethnic ones, some of them for charitable, some of them for community reasons as you might say.
 "Okay, so you said you are a Baptist minister?" "Yes." "Well, do you believe in John Calvin's teaching on predestination and hell fire?" "Why do you want to know?" "Well, only because you said you were a Baptist." "Yeah, but I mean I’m a Southern Baptist, you know that kind." Well, come one. They don’t love the question. They—ask Catholics if they really believe what their church teaches or what the Pope tells them. Of course they don’t for the most part.

The fastest growing group of people in the country has been measured as being those of who have no belief or who are atheists. By far the fastest growing, it’s doubled in the last ten years. People are evidently lying to the opinion polls, that there are not enough churches in the country—there are plenty of them. They’re not enough to take all the people who say that they go to them, just couldn’t be done, couldn’t fit them in. I don’t think people who have doubts about religion are going to tell them to opinion pollsters who call them up at dinner time. They will say, "Yes, I am a Methodist." or whatever it is, they’re not going say "I sometimes wonder if John Wesley was really the man." Not when the multiple choice boxes are being gone through.

So there are people who think that that’s the way to go politically be it the Republican Party. The last president played on it and got power through it, for example, thinks that to say someone is person of faith is axiomatically to confer a compliment on them. And if you remember, he did it to Vladimir Putin and Bush meets and says right away, “Right away, well, I could tell by looking into his eyes and seeing that he was wearing his grandmother’s crucifix, that he was just the chap for me.”

Now, in a strong field, I think that’s the stupidest thing Bush has said. And he must, I think, occasionally regret it. I wonder has Vladimir Putin ever worn his grandmother’s crucifix since? Had he ever been seen wearing it before? Or did he just think this should be enough for the president of the United States? Because if so, it would show that religion was not just metaphysically incorrect, but as I have I believe said, a danger and a poison to all of us. If our republic can be—and its president can be pushed over, like that, like someone offering garlic to a vampire, then we really are in trouble.

Thats why the Republican Party panders to the weak-minded. Its easier to be scared than brave. its easier to believe in fiction than fact. Thats why republicans win elections.