Brand New Atheist

OK, so I realized recently that nearly 5 months has gone by in 2009 and I haven’t written a single article. But I don’t have anything to write about. It’s like I wore myself out. I had so many thoughts and ideas and wrote them down that everything since has been a rehash of those thoughts. I still engage people on Twitter but even that has slowed.

I wouldn’t say I’m tired of being an atheist, I’m tired of caring. I got it out of my system and I don’t feel the need to point it out. I still hate religion for the harm that it causes and the retarded decision people make based of those religions and beliefs in supernatural beings. Regardless of whether I keep writing articles I will leave all of this available to those people who are looking for answers or just exploring.

My wife is still a believer and I don’t get in the way of her teaching that stuff to our daughter. I assume when my daughter makes her own decision later in life she’ll have the capability to choose. With a religious mother and a non-religious father she sees both sides. My daughter has never read the articles on this site but I hope someday she’s find them interesting.

The name Brand New Atheist was very clever when I learned the truth and created this site. However, I’ve noticed I get treated like someone who became an atheist yesterday because of the name. I’m considering using something different in the future.

I run my own business and business has been extremely slow. I work for clients in the ad business and some of the first cuts that get made in a slow economy are ad budgets. Everything is not caught up but I assume most people who read this know what I mean. When my clients don’t work neither do I. It doesn’t bother me that much because I always assume something will be in my way of success. I just keep trying.

In 2007 my wife and I adopted my niece, we wanted to give her something we didn’t think she was going to get otherwise. After being with us for 2 years, my niece (age 15 now) left. She didn’t want to be part of our family and she wanted to go back to her grandmothers (where there are far fewer rules). We let her go back because she was going to make us miserable if we didn’t. Can you imagine the expense this experience has cost us. Fortunately our household is back to the way it was before the adoption but the expense remains. It’s always something.

I’ve had my sister-in-law engage me in religious conversation recently. The conversations have been quite nice.

My Xbox360 died from the RedRingofDeath and Sam’s Club replaced it for free even though it was 3.5 years old. That was cool. Then my wife reminded me we don’t shop at Sam’s Club or Walmart because they are horrible companies like Monsanto.

I’ve been on a food kick recently. I became a vegetarian last year (my daughter has been for 3 years) and I thought not eating meat was going to difficult. Now I find out that a large portion of the crops grown are genetically modified organisms (GMO) and they haven’t been tested properly for human consumption. Now I’m not only a vegetarian but the majority of what I eat has to be organic. As soon as I’m done writing this I’m going to watch, The Man from Earth, and I’m going to eat organic tortilla chips with organic salsa and drink my organic lemonade.

My daughter (age 12) has been rehearsing for a Narnia play for months at the Louisville Youth Theater. She has seven showings this weekend. I’m very proud of her. I’ll get to see the play on Sunday, after which we will take her out to eat and surprise her with the gift of a Nintendo Wii.

Well that’s where I’m at. Just a (mostly) normal guy trying to get by and make a better world for my daughter.

I remember a time when Karen and I had little conversations about this. This has to be on the minds of all christians at some point in their marriage. The church and the bible give you the impression that once you marry you become one and will spend your eternity together. So inevitably one of you will ask, “If I died, would you remarry?”

It seems to be a two part question. Almost as if you’re saying, “If I died, would you desecrate our marriage by marrying someone else?” and “If I died, would you remarry and have sex and more kids?” Oddly, these things seem important when you believe in an all powerful being that left a book behind 2000 years ago with rules on how to live your life today.

In a world where you believe in such things these can be important questions. Because to you, it says a lot about the person you’re going to marry or are married to. While I think most peoples answers would be the same, you really don’t want to hear the answer. Most people will remarry and have sex and possibly have more kids.

What changes when you stop believing in the bible and your church? Well, for me, I’ve decided if my wife were to die I would not remarry. Not because of some vows I said when I was 20 years old or some feeling of entitlement towards her. The truth is, I would never marry again.

My marriage is as important to me today as it was the day I got married only for different reasons. The thought of getting married has completely lost it’s meaning. Without an all might being marriage is just a government issued legal contract. Any new relationship for me would be like Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell.

I’ve been married for 17 years. For 16 of those years I became increasingly concerned about entering heaven. The thought of entering heaven and not being with my wife was hard for me to accept. I didn’t like to think about it. I would distract myself anytime I started thinking about.

I considered asking pastors and other religious people their thoughts but I knew they wouldn’t have the answers I wanted. Because no one had the answers I sought. Apparently you have to die before you get your answers. Which often lead me to wonder why any religious person thought they had any answers since they obviously hadn’t died yet.

When we were first married it wasn’t something that I even thought about. But the more often we went to church the more I began to worry that she would spend eternity with her first husband. The more I learned about divorce and vows the more I thought she had promised her life to her first husband and our marriage wouldn’t be valid to God. I was concerned that her first vows were unbreakable and that we wouldn’t be together once we had made it into heaven.

You can imagine the torture this thought process can cause in a person. There are probably thousands of people who wonder the exact same thing right now. The only comfort I can provide to them is that gods are not real and the Bible and Quran are works of fiction. The lack of evidence for any god is everywhere and the evidence for the existence of any god is nowhere.

Once I realized the truth about gods and works of fiction I immediately knew that many of the worries I had throughout my life were total wastes of time. Imagine the countless hours that people continue to waste worrying about things that don’t exist.

That’s what my wife says to my girls when they get upset about something “Don’t trust your feelings because they will lie to you.” Yet isn’t this exactly what a lot of christians use to determine that their God is real? They use their feelings and emotions. Why do they use their feeling and emotion? Because that’s the only proof they have.

When you’re a robot like myself, feelings and emotions are easy to dismiss even when they’re your own.

I encourage you to dismiss your feelings about god and look for more. You may find that once you remove your feelings and emotions about any god, there isn’t anything left.

When I believed in God I also believed in all of that other supernatural stuff. You know, like miracles and ghosts. Like most believers I grew up thinking that those people I loved that died were watching over me.

I never really thought about why they were watching over me or when. Unless of course when I may have been masturbating. Why? Unlike during sex (with someone) when you don’t think a lot, masturbation allows your mind to wander while you’re pleasuring yourself. Many of those times I wondered if my Grandmother, Grandfather, etc. were watching over me at that moment. If they were, why? And if they weren’t, is that because there are rules to when they can watch over me?

Regardless of the fact that I thought people were watching over me, it never kept me from pleasuring myself. Which if you think about it is weird because most people would be embarrassed to be caught masturbating. But it’s OK if dead people watch you do it.

I could never reconcile this thought fully because it didn’t seem plausible that those watching over me would invade my private space like that. But like most people I just made that up in my head because that’s what made me comfortable.

When I became an atheist I immediately realized what a completely ludicrous thought process that was and how funny it was that I ever thought someone was watching over me at that moment.

So for all of us men and women that are the masters of our domain, fear not, for no one is watching over you when you are pleasuring yourself.

Based on the definition of “Agnostic” you believe that nothing is known or can be known about the existence of God. Stephen Colbert says that an agnostic is an atheist without balls.

I think there is a little more to this. God is suppose to be the most important thing in existence and yet there are two very popular words that define someone who does believe and someone who doesn’t know.

I think the moment you question God’s existence you are agnostic. Believers don’t question what they believe. Agnosticism seems to be a temporary place between making up your mind. On one side you the believer are part of some religious denomination and on the other side you’re a part of no denomination.

Agnostic doesn’t appear to be a choice but more a middle to full belief or non-belief. Have you ever questioned the Sun’s existence? No, Why? Because it’s a known an proven entity.

Someone who says they are agnostic must be searching for answers, otherwise they are just lazy. If you honestly think you’ve chosen agnosticism then you’ve decided to be ignorant and not even think about it. Maybe someone has convinced you that nothing can be known and you bought it.

Agnosticism is the same as kicking your heels off while your toes are still in the shoes.

Approximately one year ago today (October 1st 2007) I became and atheist. Every now and then I educate myself or I get educated. For instance, about a month ago (August 26th 2008) I became a vegetarian. And about a month ago (September 2nd 2008) I became a democrat.

A lot has changed for me since I became an atheist but my overall life has changed very little. I haven’t been disowned by anyone nor have I had to defend myself physically. I started writing down my thoughts the day I became an atheist and that eventually became BrandNewAtheist.com. Then I created my Twitter account to post small thoughts and sarcastic comments. I have a small following on Twitter which means a few people are occasionally interested in what I say.

What has changed the most for me is the way I think. Once I removed anything supernatural most of the ways I think about things changed in an instant. It has made me so much happier than I ever was before. It’s like being released from a mental prison and knowing they can never put you away again.

I thank all of you who have befriended be on Twitter and commented on my site.

I regularly hear and read christians and atheists say that we (atheists) want to convert christians to atheism. That is so wrong, we want to de-convert them. They were born un-converted, we all were, and then many of us unlucky one were converted to whatever religion our guardians believed in.

Yes, I want to de-convert all of the converted. I’m not the most educated person when it comes to debating with a theologion but everything they say is made up, how can you argue with that?

It’s the regular people that can easily be de-converted because all you have to do is get them to read the bible. Not the warm and fuzzy crap they spew in church, the crazy stuff they don’t tell you about because it’s crazy.

Do you want take make the world a better place? De-convert your family and friends and stamp out the ignorance that comes with religion.

Isaac Zamora went on a shooting rampage last week in Washington. He killed 6 people. His reasoning was “I kill for God. I listen to God.” His attorney, Keith Tyne, said “Clearly there are significant mental health issues at play.”

If you do something good in the name of “God” you are praised, but when you do bad it is “mental health issues”. Why do people who believe in God believe it when someone says God spoke to them and they did something generous but they refuse to believe God would have someone take out a few lost souls?

You can’t have it both ways. Either you believe God talks to people or you don’t and just because the action is bad doesn’t give you the right to reject it as crazy. If a person who does something bad in the name of God is considered crazy then that would also apply to anyone who does something good in the name of God.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080911/ap_on_re_us/shooting_rampage

This is my first 9/11 as an atheist.

9/11 isn’t a holiday but it has become a day that Americans remember being attacked by religious extremist. America is the head of the snake. Yes, I know where I was on 9/11.

I was really ignorant about why anyone would hate our country. Like most Americans I spend my time with my family or working.

After becoming an atheist I now realize that religious extremist are what come from showing respect to religion. Religion doesn’t deserve respect nor should we give it. I’m not talking about people, I’m talking about religion. People can be religious, they can change and be non-religious, but religion will always be religion.