What I find strange is that there is evidence that early Homo sapiens understood the Sun, the Earth, the Moon, the weather etc. were the important things. We would move with the animal herds, or towards the land where certain things grew at certain times of the year, or away from the harsh weather/towards more suitable weather, all so we could keep surviving. Then somewhere along the line, even with more experience and knowledge as a species, it became that worship of Gods or a God that was the important thing. People locked themselves inside sets of rules because it seemed they couldn't trust themselves to live life for themselves outside them.
Granted there may have been droughts, famines, murderers and rapists as common occurrences and that we may have thought, for a time, that we needed to live our lives a certain way or worship a certain deity to make these bad things stop, or someone came along before there were Police forces (not that they're any great help now!) or courts to scare people into acting a certain way or they would burn eternally in the after life/have a tranquil eternity in the afterlife.
But for me now we have come full circle and we understand, again, that the Sun, the Earth, the Moon, the weather etc. are the important things (Aboriginal peoples of Austalasia have never swayed from that thought!) and through advanced knowledge and experience as a species we have learnt to farm and preserve ourselves without having to follow the herds or the weather (although we will have to move out of Northern Europe whenever the next big Ice Age comes, but that could be many thousands of years away!).
Worship can come in the form of family and friends, or in self improvement if you don't like your family that much; if nobody else is worth the effort in your life, worship yourself and make yourself the best you can be. Why worship something that a random weird cult around the Levant told us we should worship thousands of years ago when in all those thousands of years there has never been a single grain of evidence that worship of this "God" does our species any good at all? Surely family, friends and self - since they are apparent - are far more important than fearing the big hoodoo monster-man beyond the clouds who is supposedly judging us by every move we make?
Forget that shit. We have moved on as a species since those rules came about six thousand years or so ago.
Okay we may have learnt a lot of life experiences from religion in that time but you also learn a lot of that through living life yourself, and often a lot of it is learnt in childhood. When you say something to someone and it makes them upset, even at four years old, that experience teaches you as much as any religion does. Similarly when you punch your sibling in the face and it hurts them, you learn a hell of a lot from that. It's not nice seeing someone else upset or hurt and you learn how to live your life accordingly to not let those things happen. If - and this does happen a lot - there are people who do grow to enjoy seeing others upset or hurt, human experience has shown us that it rarely ends well for these people and we do have Police forces and courts of Law now to help us with these kind of people. And through the experience of seeing what these kind of people have done over the many thousand of years we see the best way to live life and sadism isn't that. We don't need a God or a set of rules within a religion to tell us that, we have our history as a species to show us evidence of what is right and wrong.
To answer Pam's question, yes, I am an Atheist!
