Christians and premarital sex

Why is it so important to wait to marriage? Well, back when the bible was being written (and up until recently) there was no way to tell for sure if a child was yours. Women were property, their main value derived from their ability to have children. They were property used by men to beget more men. Marriage was primarily a financial transaction where the husband buys a wife from the wife’s father. The father then walks his daughter down the aisle and “gives” his daughter to the other man. It’s all about property. Thus it was important to the men that their “property” not be previously “used”.

The theology behind it was just whipped up out of early church father’s utter disdain for woman and the human body. St. Augustine for example hated women and sex, and from this hate centuries of boys and girls were brought up to be ashamed of their bodies and desires. Your body and desires are perfectly natural and there is nothing wrong or dirty about them. Believing they are can lead to all types of sick disorders and self-loathing.

Besides these side effects, waiting to marriage can have some disastrous consequences. There are plenty of young evangelical men and women who are now rushing into marriage way to early, and for the wrong reasons. They’ve been told their entire lives that they can’t give in to their strongest urges until they’re married, and so these young adults are diving into marriage in their late teens, early twenties, just so they can have sex. They might not have ever dated anyone else seriously, and they aren’t fully ready to support themselves. Financial stress is one of the leading causes of divorce, and these kids just aren’t set up well enough on their own two feet to be in a marriage.

Here are the divorce rates among Christians, Jews, and Atheists:

Religion	% have been divorced
Jews	30%
Born-again Christians	27%
Other Christians	24%
Atheists, Agnostics	21%

(I wouldn’t be surprised if  Born-again is so high up there because the kids rush into marriage just to have sex)

It’s important to experiment in life to see what works for you. You’re shooting yourself in the foot if you don’t experience all life has to offer before you die.  I have a housemate that is engaged to a woman he’s never had sex with. The woman does not want to have sex before marriage, and so he’s going to wait 5-6 years (supposedly, if they last that long) to marry her and then have sex. That’s a disaster waiting to happen. What if he marries this person and they don’t have good sexual chemistry? Then he’s shafted for life! And don’t try and say “Well, the other qualities that makes him love her should overpower the lack of sexual chemistry”. That’s naive and unrealistic. Sex matters. You can have a great personality, but if the sex just isn’t good, the marriage/relationship is not going to work.

Telling kids to wait until marriage also increases the chance of teen pregnancy. In September 2009, a study came out showing a link between how religious a state is, and the teen pregnancy rate. Here is an indisputable FACT of life that will not change no matter what any religious book will ever say: Teens will have sex. This has been true for all  time, and will continue to be true forever. Telling teens to not have sex until they are married does nothing to keep them from having sex. Abstinence only does not work. Instead they will just not use birth control and will get pregnant, which raises the number of abortions. (Hint, want to stop abortions? Teach safe sex)

When it comes down to it, sex is all about responsibility. Some people are more responsible than others at different ages. I was very responsible when I was a teenager, many of my friends were not. Now that I’m an adult, I’m even more responsible, yet I know people my age and older who aren’t. It depends on the person. Some people are emotionally mature enough to handle sexual activity in their teens, some are not. If they are ready for sex, they must be responsible enough to also use protection consistently. Diseases are out there and they do not magically disappear when you get married.

If some people feel they are not ready for sex and want to wait until marriage, that’s fine, it’s their body, they can make that choice, but don’t then go and try to tell me I should do the same, that my body is sinful and dirty, that
I should be ashamed just like them. Marriage is an outdated patriarchal institution when it comes to managing sex.

It’s all irrelevant

What is the proper way to worship god? Should people be baptized? Must you be born again? Is there a heaven or a hell? Must you fast on Ramadan? What foods can you eat and what foods should you avoid? Must women wear head coverings? What is sin?

There is no doubt that questions like these are extremely important to believers of one religion or another, but ultimately they are irrelevant. Why? Because every single question like this assumes that a god exists, despite the fact that all religions have equally failed to provide anything more than just sheer determined faith as evidence. You can’t ignore this crucial bottle neck. If god doesn’t exist, then all the other arguments about his/her/its nature is irrelevant. No matter how you try and get around it, it boils down to this:

Also, notice how logically if you make a claim “I have a baseball” you have to be able to provide evidence to prove the statement if it is to be taken seriously. This is the same for “I have a [insert any noun, including god(s) here]” This is called burden of proof, and its how logic works, its how court systems work, its how reality works. Innocent until proven guilty. Something is assumed not true until there is evidence to support the contrary. So far no evidence has been provided. Meerly willing something to be, no matter how hard to clentch your fists and focus during prayers, does not make it true, nor does your effort count as evidence.

Atheist anger and the strategy for taking over the world

I had an epiphany of sorts while lying in bed this morning: I’m never going to win by being angry all the time, and trying to reason with fundamentalists is pointless… This is something that is going to take a while for me to grasp since I’ve been so angry for so long. I feel my anger has alienated friends, and worst of all caused some tensions with my significant other…

But what can I say? I have good reasons to be angry. I’m viewed as immoral by a good chunk of the religious populous, I’m barred from holding office in five states, some view Atheists as not citizens, the religious have a powerful lobby with which they influence our government, an evangelical christian has been president for the past 8 years, religious terrorism and genocide happens all the time around the world, the list goes on and on….

So what is my goal as an Atheist? What would my dream world be? Well for one, there wouldn’t be any religion to drive people mad. Thinking about this, I came to a second epiphany of sorts: the deconversion of the world will take a long time. It’s a slow process, we’re winning, but it’s slow. In the mean time, my abrasive attitude is not helping win people to my side.

I think my anger has a lot to do with how I deconverted. After slowly ebbing away from being a born again evangelical I watched “Root of all evil?” by Richard Dawkins. He was angry too, and his reasons for being angry became my reasons, on top of all the baggage that comes with being an ex-evangelical. (I’ve noticed that my friends who weren’t raised in a strict faith are on the whole a LOT less angry than those who were) I suddenly found myself alone on campus in one of the most religious towns in the southern bible belt. I felt isolated and cornered. (I feel much better now with the help of online communities like Atheist Nexus and the Rational Response Squad)

With all this in mind, what should I do? Well, for one, I think I need to chill out. Most of my energy is spent in shouting matches with fundamentalist loonies. I need to stop this as it is a waste of time. No amount of evidence or reason will ever persuade these people. Instead I should focus on religious moderates.

In focusing on religious moderates, I should emphasise the positives of Atheism and be friendly. I have to work on the public image of Atheists and try to de-stigmatize the word. I also have to readjust my goals.  The world will never be completely free from religion. I need to accept this. I think changing my goals to “Minimal religious interference in government” is much more attainable.

People are going to be religious. My trying to eradicate that is just as bad as fundamentalists trying to shove their views down my throat. I can still think their beliefs are ridiculous, but what they think in their own homes or places of worship is their business, not mine. I don’t need to get stressed out and angry over that. Just as long as they stay out of the public government.

It’s going to take some time for me to get over the constant anger, the immediate feelings of loathing when I even hear the word religion. It’s going to take a while for me to get good at focusing on the positive and ignoring the fundies. Perhaps, in time, I might even go to my girlfriend’s Unitarian Universalist church.

God’s simple plan of Salvation

One of the major unfortunate things about living in Lynchburg is that one often get inundated by religious pamphlets. I found this one in wal-mart and decided to look at it more closely. It’s titled “God’s simple plan of Salvation” by Lifegate inc.  The pamphlet tells me that “I must first realize that I am a sinner.”  Secondly, because I’m a sinner I’m “condemned to die and burn forever in hell.” It sounds a lot like the classic advertising strategy of telling a person they can’t live without a product, and they badly need it. (Literally in this case)

This is where it gets really confusing. The pamphlet says that god (the guy who’s rig this whole existence thing up, with me as a worthless sinner doomed to suffer for eternity) loves me so much that he sacrificed his only begotten son, and that “jesus had to shed his blood and die.” It then points out the rules that jesus was operating under that forced him to have to die: “…without shedding of blood is no remission.” [Hebrews 9:22]  Ok, now wait just a second. God (at the same time also jesus) set up the universe, they set up these sick “there must be blood” rules. It’s god! He’s all powerful! Why does he go through all these dramatics? Why not just forgive us all outright, instead of killing his only begotten son? (And why does he only have one? Can’t he make more? And from where was he “begotten”?)

Why not skip the whole sin thing and just make us perfect? If all he wants is for us to love him, why not just make us his personal little fan club? What? Is he bored? Being omniscient he must have know that by making us sinners some of us wouldn’t repent, or might grow up before jesus came, and that all those people would suffer and burn for eternity. It’s really fucking sick honestly.

The funniest bit is when the pamphlet states ” Although we cannot understand how, [jesus died in our place]. It’s true! God cannot lie!” Now who says this is what god said? The bible? That was written by a bunch of men over the course of four centuries, with various parts edited out and altered by the medieval church councils, not to mention scribal error. The pamphlet also says “If this is not perfectly clear, read this track over and over again until it is and don’t put it down”  Don’t you brainwash people by telling them something over and over again?

Why is what you believe not a myth?

Last night I remembered a huge turning point in my life. I was 16 and in the car with my then girlfriend who had just converted to catholicism. While I was no longer “born again” I wasn’t an atheist. I had been having a discussion with her about mythology. We were talking about the various Greek, Egyptian, and Norse gods. We both found the topic interesting, and then I made the comment “I think christian mythology is really cool too, I wonder if there is a book with all the various angels and daemons…” At that point she became upset and told me not to call her beliefs a myth.

It killed the conversation, and I didn’t bring this up, but the question hit me like a ton of bricks; “Why is what the Greeks, Egyptians, and Vikings believed a myth, but not what you believe?” I just couldn’t think of how she would have responded. Possibly one of two ways “They just aren’t” or “nobody believes in those gods anymore…” The second response begs the question “so the validity of a belief is based on the number of believers?” This is clearly an ad populum fallacy. If 3 billion people believe lead can float in water, it doesn’t make it so. Same as if a great multitude believe in god, it doesn’t make it so.