TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR TEACHING OR BEING SILENT IN THE FACE OF RELIGION - THE CHIEF ENEMY OF TRUTH

We must hate religion but this is not hating the people in it. You can loathe a person’s error and not hate that person.  The person is not their error.  And we must in turn grant them the right to tell us if we are in error. Being attached to errors is a habit that needs correction and should welcome it.

Error is an evil in the way your eyes would be if they could deliberately blur your vision when you are trying to edge along a cliff.  If you do not fall that is luck.  It is not an excuse for excusing what your eyes are doing.

Those who error are not the consciously evil cause of their evil. Error is a mistake to be corrected not a crime to be hated. We must hate nobody.

People warn against being too pushy.  When a religion does that they call it proselytism.  It gets tricky for the law and other things in life are pushy.  Businesses very much so.  We think of the obvious

#the priest demanding that you go to confession for you are are risk of losing your eternal relationship with God.

#the Bible wielding preacher knocking at your door.

#the fanatic holding a sword to you saying you must convert or die.

Yet we overlook the real issues, the other forms of it.

Many of us go to the funeral services provided by domineering faiths such as Islam and Christianity.  There the Lord is thanked for saving that person from eternal perdition.  That is indirect threatening.  The scripture readings will bully and warn.  The prayers seek to impose the will of the praying person on you.  Religion says you are in the hands of God even if you think you are not so that means when they pray for God's plan to work they are asking that you be a pawn in it.  Saying your will is not your own but you seek only the will of God is a lie.  You are making God's will your own and that is just another way of making it about you.

We cannot encourage that people be challenged during such worship services but it is impossible to be too harsh on anybody who walks out offended or who firmly says something.  The person is simply refusing to be bullied.

And if such a person were being a proselytic crank the faith has no moral authority to condemn.

If you have any respect for yourself you must hate all that is wrong and incorrect. Error and evil oppose your freedom. If they hurt somebody else not you then it is only luck that you were not hurt. It is degrading to let error and evil thrive by doing nothing for that is moving a step or stride closer to the possible loss of your liberty and happiness which is incompatible with self-respect. The wicked and the misled have to practice what they believe or think they believe and that is dangerous. You don’t let anyone who believes that holy water and not medicine eradicates disease become a doctor so don’t let people walk over you when you know you are right and they are wrong.

People often do not realise that to promote error either actively or by doing nothing to prevent it is to promote slander. When you make a mistake and believe it is not a mistake you are accusing the person who rightly contradicts you of being mad, stupid, lazy or a liar. To let error thrive is to have those who know its wrong be accused of being stupid, too lazy to learn the truth, wrong, mad or at least two of these. Beliefs claim to be right so if they are not right they are asking for this. You have to be one of these if you are wrong. The Atheist cannot just sit by and let religion and other irrationalities smear her or him. All who condemn us are asking for us to give them the facts whether they love them or hate them. Give them what they ask.

Truth has lots of enemies and to keep people away from the truths they should know is to spread bad example and threaten what is a friend and support to us all and is therefore to degrade ourselves. What others believe is our business but if they will not listen we must find people who will. Every step or non-step that takes you or others deeper into error undermines the power of the truth and makes you an ambassador for evil. We are not saying you should be right all the time but that you should try to be.

Religion is opposed to freedom of thought and even liberal religion has a lot to answer for though conservative religion has far more to answer for. For example, both forbid you to believe in revenge and will call for your punishment if you do. Both do this more because God supposedly forbids revenge than for real concern about revenge being wrong. Once you believe in a revelation from God you say that our thinking should be abandoned if God's revelation conflicts with it. And liberals believe in revelation as much as conservatives do - they just have a more humanistic interpretation. They care about man and woman more than they should so they are not being consistent with their belief in God for belief in God demands that God should be obeyed even if heeding him can wreck the world.
 
Any freedom you get then is given to you begrudgingly because there is always somebody to disapprove of what you are doing and they are given the freedom to do that. Religion is chaos for there is so much disagreement between members of the same religion and between different religions. If people dropped belief in miracles and revelations from Heaven and in the supernatural and therefore God there would be more unity and agreement and less insecurity induced in people for there would be a better sense of being accepted by others and society. How could you like God anyway when he opposes freedom of thought? He did not give you free will then as a gift but as a curse but he really wants you to have no freedom but to be pressured to do what he wants.
 
The Bible and religion are all about the word should. This is a bad thing. The word should in whatever language it is in means the same thing: you are bad if you don’t do what I think you must do. It is an insult and programs people to feel guilt. If you have to give advice don’t give it in that manner. Give advice in such a way that it is intended to help the person think for themselves. Don’t impose by thinking they should do this or that or by telling them what they should or shouldn’t do. You are not better than them. The very concept of God itself is an insult for God presents himself as something you should become like – thus God is a domineering and malevolent concept.
 

No religion is right for everybody. Mormonism will appeal to some who would not like to be Roman Catholic. Many Muslims would not like to become Wiccans or witches. Everybody has different tastes. Thus we make no apology when any religion manipulates parents into making their children members of their own cult for letting our blood boil. What kind of compassion is religion showing in this? What kind of compassion did Jesus show if he claimed to be the way and the truth and the life as the evil Bible says for not everybody could like him and find meaning in him. The arrogance is incredible. The bigotry is plain. Will Humanism not suit everybody either? It can suit everyone for everybody is interested in secular life and Humanism is therapy not a cult and its truths are liberating to all who put them into practice. Self-esteem is what the religious searcher is after and we can give an easy way to it instead of them looking for a religion that makes them feel better about themselves.

Oppose all evil customs for someone has got to do it and if we don’t people will suffer. If religion lies or is inconsistent in its doctrine we have a right to point it out. Lies and inconsistencies are as bad as each other and they are offence against us.

When people condemn you for doing right ignore them for they are only being malicious and they know they don’t know it all. They know their slanders are lies or guesses.

Your degree of anger is only justified in so far as you are sure you are right to be angry. If you are not very sure of your moral principles being right then you should not be getting very angry. Religionists often claim the right to be angry and yet they do not try to the utmost to be right. They cannot prove their morals are sensible. That is pure selfishness.

We have to promote our consequentialist doctrine for our own sakes and so we must never miss the chance to diminish the faith of the absolutist or the consequentialist who has doctrines that undermine her or his consequentialism. If consequences matter then teaching consequentialism matters more than helping others for it directs them to help themselves.

To offend against the truths that there is no God and no free will and that we should hate no one but be kind to all is very serious indeed. That is because these are the most important truths. They are the most important for they pertain to the most important acts of right behaviour and to offend them is to say that you are worth nothing and that nobody else is either. To be good and to defend ourselves against those who err we must combat error. We cannot be expected to sit back and not inform those who are led astray by religion for error has to be divisive. If we don’t use truth as the basis of unity, we will have less hope of being one family on earth. Religion as a form of error and promotion of error and refusing to be open-minded, is behind many wars and even if our opposition to its spread saves only one life it is worth it and so truth must prevail. Proselytism is a duty for this reason but we must arrange that people will proselytise themselves and not us them. Yes we must share the Atheist Gospel with everyone but in such a way that they simply absorb the light from us and convert themselves. We do not believe in making converts though we do believe that we must try and bring others to the light. What we want us for all people to have the chance to make converts of themselves. Religion is not entitled to any respect even if it leads to one death that would not be without it but respect it we must. We are dealing with victims of nature.

It is not enough to be an Atheist. The Atheist who has a lot to learn about the important things and the reasons for being true to them could be every bit as dangerous as the religious fanatic. The Atheist who follows the Humanist system properly should turn out to be a special human being.

The advice of some that when a religion teaches evil such as that putting adulterers to death is right you should not attack this teaching. What you should do about it is simply just say that putting adulterers is wrong without any condemnation and without any reference to the religion. This teaching is pure evil. First of all, it indicates that though people and even religions are influenced most by the attitudes of society and the fear of its condemnation  this should not be used to stop religion inciting violence against adulterers. With that softy softy attitude religion won’t take any criticism seriously. Secondly, it implies that being nice to religion is more important than fighting to save lives and to keep them safe. Religion is composed of people but at the end of the day it is a system not people. The victims who have been brainwashed by religion and polluted by it need our help but religion as a system should be condemned. Thirdly, religious leaders are very manipulative. Even religions like the Roman Catholic Church are proof of that. The Church blissfully ignores the scholarship that identifies problems and contradictions in the Bible and the archaeological and logical refutation of the Bible and despite decrying fundamentalism is undoubtedly fundamentalist itself.   

We know that truth comes first so in anything important we must all believe the same things. Beliefs affect how we live and feel so we must make sure they are right for we can’t have people suffering and enduring the problems caused by disagreement and error for nothing. To let error thrive is to have those who know it's wrong be accused of being stupid, too lazy to learn the truth, wrong or mad.  Beliefs claim to be right so if they are not right they are asking for this. Your mind is meant to be rational even if some minds cannot be rational for all things are not as they should be. That is what you have a brain for. To degrade your mind by irrationality is to degrade your whole being and to degrade others by offering your degraded thoughts and works to them. If it is wrong to guide others to rationality then everything is wrong. If you have any respect for yourself you must hate all that is wrong and incorrect. It is degrading to let error and evil thrive by doing nothing for that is moving a step or stride closer to the loss of your liberty and happiness which is incompatible with self-respect. The wicked and the misled have to practice what they believe or think they believe and that is dangerous. It is nonsense to say that whatever people believe is right for how can it be right when they all believe one another to be wrong?

Error has to be exposed for it always wastes time and energy. It often does worse than that. To leave error alone means that it’s problems and the pain of dealing with it are being relayed to somebody else and that is totally unfair. People will not be fooled forever.

Some say, “Truth is an absolute value even more than a person is for there would be no persons if there were no truth for there would be no existence. You cannot regard persons as important if truth is not important. It is as simple as that!” But this would only be true of truth relating to our origin and destiny and how we should live. The other truths are not as important. We may be made of earth but that does not mean that earth is of absolute value but only that the earth that composes us and makes us what we are is.
 
The argument then proves that the important truths of philosophy are absolutely valuable. Therefore, it is always wrong to fail to try to lead a person towards the truths of Atheism, determinism and how to live and what to hope for. That is how it can be wrong to tell a wife the truth about her cheating husband depending on the circumstances. Inferior truth, that is truth that is inferior in importance to truths concerning the ultimate questions, does not know anything or suffer. Persons know things and suffer so persons come before truth when the truth will hurt. Truth never hurts feelings when it is expressed properly.
 
When you can’t tell the truth you can lead the person to find the truth by themselves. It is universally and always wrong to hide any of the principles in this book or to make no effort to give people the chance to see their truth. Philosophy matters more than any truth for it gives the rule for life and knowledge and wisdom. This teaching does not forbid all lies but only lies pertaining to the truth of existence and right conduct.

Go, teach all nations. Baptise them in the name of knowledge and reason, in these two keys to the glorification of humankind so that they will rise from the cesspools of insanity to newness of life.