By Dano ~ W e are all born atheists! Look at it this way. If it were important for us to know whether there is a god as in the bible and what happens to us when we die, we would all more or less believe the same thing. We would all be born with that instinctual knowledge, just like instinctively knowing that we need to eat. On the contrary we are all born atheists and may be taught to believe some form of mythology before we die, or we may not, depending who our parents are and where we are born. Believing in a "Bible God", heaven, hell, angels, devils and all that made up stuff is incidental to living, loving, enjoying life and dyeing. Other than how it effects our capacity for reproducing. Mother nature (God/it) has no regard at all for what we believe,only how well we live. The same thing happens to all of us in the end, and it again becomes just as important to us as it was for the eternity before we were born. I know I never worried about it before I was born...

By Dano ~ I t's ok to be ignorant about god. I am even willing to admit to having an almost absolute conviction that there is no evidence of anything like Bible God, being "out there" I also believe that if organized religions hadn't taken over their minds, most people would admit to being ignorant also.The majority of people won't admit it though because of the connotations of what the word ignorant implies. Let me tell you, realizing that I was completely ignorant of what god is, never mind what it wants from me, has been the most freeing and satisfying conclusion I have ever come to, and then to realize that every person on this planet is just as ignorant as I am as to whom or what created everything, is like being born again. Now I think most people on this web site would be willing to agree that I lack a few to many literary refinements to be considered educated or at least that it is fairly obvious that I am not one of the most complicated thinkers he...

By Dano ~ I 'm a atheist/agnostic/humanist, pantheist/whatever. In other words I have read enough about how Christianity got started plus all of the suffering caused by this faith to realize that I could never be a believer of pretty much any of it. I have gotten used to being shunned by people who I have eventually realized were born again Christians or had a belief in some sort of invisible deity and wore the smug demeanor of someone who believed that anyone who didn't, was working for the devil. I have never been bashful about telling anyone that I think all religions are a crock of shit, and are responsible for most of evil and divisiveness we see today. Now to be clear about all of the comic book paraphernalia that goes along with the Christian faith such as the devil, angels, heaven, hell, virgin births and blood sacrifices to god and such, it is clear to me that they also consist of what makes good fertilizer. So! Without a god to keep me on the straight and...

By Dano ~ I think the biggest challenge we as humans face is to accept the fact that we are smarter than we used to be but we still have a lot of evolving to do. We as Homo Sapiens , managed to survive the transition from being stronger in tooth and claw to a more slender version with larger brains, and it only took a few million years of nature selecting certain individuals who had those extra brain cells and could out smart everyone else in the business of keeping warm and killing whatever and whoever we came into contact with, and endowing them with more and longer reproducing capacities. Yes Neanderthal man may have had bigger muscles and more hair but the guy who could bring home the bacon, won the favors of little miss cave girl, and departed this small world leaving more copies of himself. A sharper arrow, a truer shaft, and an appreciation of the target, even today, beats big and stupid. All that said, if we are to maintain any piece of mind, we just have to adju...

By Dano ~ E very now and then I find myself wondering if there really is a way to communicate with whatever force that caused us to exist. The thought that I just might accidentally stumble upon a way to ask our creator for favors, and get answers is a reoccurring, futile mental exercise, that I delve into on occasion. The simple answer, to which, I suspect, has always been right in front of me all along. Big Bang!!! (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Perhaps we are already in communication, by default with whatever pulled the trigger for the ' Big Bang '. Maybe in that millisecond of pure energy explosion, we became a part of whatever is, was, or ever will be. We were preordained to evolve from slime on some prehistoric beach, and be made of the stuff of the universe. I keep thinking that life has been difficult for some time now and I sure would like to hit the god lottery. I've thought and thought about it, and even looked at the writings of those who claim to speak t...

By Dano ~ I believe that I have found something much better than a relationship with Bible God and his son, whom he created with a mortal woman, to be a sacrifice to himself, so that he can forgive mankind for the sins that he, programmed them to commit when he created them. Reality (Photo credit: nualabugeye ) After years of trying to make sense of this kind of mumbo-jumbo, found in the bible, which I will confess does contain a lot of poetic verbiage along with mostly nonsensical garbage I have discovered the simple beauty of just being realistic. Since I am convinced that no one really can define adequately what they mean by the word, god, I have come to the conclusion that ABSOLUTE REALITY, is the purest definition. I find myself loving reality, the purest form of reality that I can find, wherever I can find it. I have come to love the infinitesimal, relatively insignificant speck of life that I am, here on this insignificant planet, because of the realness of it. I care...

By Dano ~ I am at a hiatus in my longstanding altitude of skepticism concerning almost everything. It just doesn't work for me anymore now that I have to come to a complete and unequivocal disbelief in all things religious. Offered as explanation~ The evidence for the Christian religion and the Bible as being just a plagiarized collection of parts and pieces of other religions all cobbled together with a large amount of Jewish history and belief that had been passed down for many generations and codified into a cannon, for the purpose of unifying and strengthening emperor Constantine's control over the Roman empire, is all too obvious. So obvious that I have become bored with it. I used to love it when a Jesus freak, christobot would come to this site ( Ex-Christian ), spouting all of his/her hackneyed phrases, full of circular reasoning, and ridiculous biblical jargon, about how Jesus died for me and by doing this, all of my sins are forgiven. I knew from reading o...

By Dano ~ G uess what! In America today... You can be a liar, and not much will happen to you except that you may be elected President. Image by Vermario via Flickr You can say that you don't believe in any "faith based" theology or mythology today, and go about your life, but you won't be accepted by many of your neighbors (especially if you live in the south),or relatives for that matter. If you run for office you may get one or two votes, yours, and your significant others' (if she/he is a free thinker). In America today, you can say that you don't believe there is a God and Jesus never existed, without being burned at the stake, in contrast to what would happen to you for expressing the same sentiments about Allah and Mohammad in a Muslim country, where you will most likely loose your head, (literally). If you grew up in America,there is a pretty good chance, that until you reached an age when you started to think for yourself, that you had been...

By Dano ~ I am 75 years old, and have been a skeptic on the subject of religion for most of my life. I have arrived at the point where virtually all things requiring faith in supernatural things, seems just plain silly to me. The garden of Eden thing, makes so little sense when analyzed with a logical mind that it is irritating to me to even think about it. The Jesus story, is so patently, a blood sacrifice to an imaginary god story, and even dumber than many of the, sacrifice to god stories, that preceded it, that I want to scream. It makes no sense folks, the whole Idea that the creator of the universe would need, or want a sacrifice to himself is nothing more than an insult to whatever brought about the big bang, assuming that "It" could be insulted. The way I see it, is that the human animal is so insignificant in relation to many other things in the universe, including other forms of life that theoretical scientists postulate as having a very high degree of pro...

By Dano ~ T his article is based on the assumption that there is an intelligent God, and that, he/she/it, made everything, has perfect knowledge of everything, past, present, and future, and can do anything. I personally find all religions, so lacking in critical thought , logic, reality, and just plain common sense, to be good for nothing more than a good laugh, therefore this piece of prose, wholly of my own opinion! Image via Wikipedia If you believe that God is something like an old man, up in the sky, watching everything we do, especially who we have sex with, and where and when, and how, you are absolutely correct. God's plan for us , and why he made the mating process so pleasurable is, God likes babies, lots of them. It's in his very own instruction book. (Go forth and multiply) Unless you are reproducing God could care less about you. He designed us to start falling apart as soon as we quit reproducing. He also likes it when we help our fellow man to reproduce...

By Dano ~ C an you imagine the deathly silence in a church full of people, if someone went up to the pulpit and said, " Fellow parishioners, we must stop all of this talking about Faith!. Now that we are grown up, we must stop believing things that our common sense tells us aren't true, we must stop teaching our children things that cause them to hate themselves and others!, we must stop singing praises to an imaginary old man up in the sky. It just aint healthy. One thing that might happen as a result of a speech like that, is that the biggest, baddest redneck in the first pew might say something like "Aw aint gonna have no one talkin bout my Gahwed lak thet, and threaten the life of the speaker if he didn't stop talking and get the hell outa there. Now this vociferous defender of the faith, very likely has earned his seat at the front of the church, by "religiously" speaking out against any reform of the Blue Laws in his county, and is one of the mo...

By Dano ~ I 'm not in the mood to make any effort to compose an intricate piece of prose so I just want to ask some questions (rhetorical really), and see if I get any answers. 1. What kind of person can pretend to be religious, and proudly proclaim their "bornagainess", just so they can be politically correct ? E.g. politicians who commit all of your generic crimes, and misdemeanors, such as theft ,(taking money from lobbyists) Not paying their taxes, soliciting sex with minors, adultery, voting for outlandish pay raises, and perks for themselves, while at the same time voting to raise our taxes. Who distort the truth to such an extent to get elected, that to watch their election adds on TV is down right funny. I don't think I would ever get elected dog catcher , because I'm such a poor liar I always get caught. I suspect that they are of the same species as those who pretend to care about the environment, and then drive a vehicle that gets 10 miles t...

By Dano ~ I don't hate anyone, not even Christians. That said though, I do hate things, and the number one thing I hate is dishonesty. Image by southerntabitha via Flickr Now I am not, and don't claim to be intellectual in any sense of the word, but for the sake of clarity I will try very hard to not sound too dumb here, and I will use spell check. That's about the extent of my intellectual ability. I repeat. I don't hate Christians, or anyone else for very long periods of time because it takes too much energy. Energy that (at my age,74), I could be using for more satisfying pursuits, but as in my opening statement, I do hate dishonesty, because it defiles the dignity of what we have so arduously become as Homo Sapiens, and the most insidious form of dishonesty is self delusion. When you are dishonest with yourself, it cheapens and diminishes the whole 'Life" experience. I know physically beautiful people who habitually lie about everything. One lad...

By Dano -- I taught myself to type about 50 years or so ago. I was in the Air Force, and I bought one of those old mechanical typewriters, used, at a pawn shop. Image by Colin Purrington via Flickr It was also one of the major times in my life that I thought I had everything in life figured out, and I had figured out that Jesus was love, love was God, and I loved Jesus. I remember I typed a bunch of letters to my relatives,the ones whom I knew were Christians, outlining this epiphany. Well to make a brief religious awakening story, short, a few people reminded me, that I had grown no halo, I got tired of my one way conversation with God, someone stole the typewriter, and I got back to sinning just like all the other guys. Since then I have relied upon my wives, (bofum), to do any lengthy typing projects. Thank evolution that even though some of my more frivolous skills, like typing, have faded, the more satisfying ones are as good ever. Those laid down in the baser parts o...

By Dano -- I don't know how or when I became a total skeptic, but somewhere along the line I acquired the talent for an almost instantaneous recognition of bullshit. Image by ThreadedThoughts via Flickr I enjoy reading Nigerian scam letters for their humor. The poor grammar and the pathetic attempts to use religion as embellishment, plus the ever present warning to "Don't reveal this to anyone else, and reply only to me", I find hilarious. I assume that ever since the first air head sent the first money, to the first scammer, to pay for the cost of securing and sending his very own 5 million dollars, that was left to him/her by someone, or needs your bank account number, so 25 million dollars can be transferred out of the country, before the authorities get wind of it, that the main topic of conversation in all those little third world Internet cafes is, how stupid Americans are. I have seen stories on TV about folks who have been duped by these phishe...

By Dano -- N ow that the Noah's Ark Ministries International research team has proclaimed with 99.9% certainty, that they have found the Ark atop Mount Ararat , in Turkey , we can believe beyond any doubt, the story of how God, because he was pissed, drowned every living thing on planet earth, except Noah , (The only man who met his strict standards), his family, and two, of several billion species of animal life. Basically, we now know, with absolute certainty, that God dictated every word of the bible, and was there watching, to make sure that Caesars people included in the official Roman version of his creation of everything, only true stories of his miracles, etc. This discovery, positively legitimizes all stories in the bible, that contain stuff that we sinners, several thousand years later, may question, just because all we have for a standard of proof, is something called science. We all know, Satan uses science, very effectively, to make us doubt things like the ...

By Dano -- I am inclined to think that people who believe in Christianity or Islam any faith based religion, are intellectually inferior, not as highly evolved as I am, but I know that not to be true. Image by pixelviz via Flickr I know that I am not as smart as many others that I have known, and indeed, I am intellectually lazy. I read what is written here on ex Christian, and know for a fact that I could never be as learned, or have the command of the English language, as some of the contributors here, not to mention the tenacity to think through the intricacies of a subject that they seem to have. A few year back I asked Dr. Valerie Tarico how a very intelligent person could possibly believe all the nonsense in the Bible, and she replied that some of the most intelligent are the most able, to dig themselves in the deepest. Not a direct quote, but I took it to mean the obvious. Really intelligent people have the capacity to fool not only others to a great degree, but them...