Why I am an atheist – Alexandria Schneider

I am an atheist because I’m queer, specifically a pansexual transgirl. While I was in denial over my true self, I prayed to God nightly to just “Make these feelings go away, and make me a normal boy”, or “Please, take this pain away…just make me a normal girl…”. All I ever got in response was silence. When I almost took my life over it, I finally admitted that there was no god, and I was a girl. And when I came out to my parents, then they threw me out, I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of “loving God” would make a childs parents declare them “disgusting” and an “abomination”.

That’s why I’m an atheist.

Alexandria Schneider
United States

A little dose of hemp will cure everything

Do these claims make you at all suspicious? A few people on Twitter told me I should look into this panacea.

Cures heart disease!

Eases anxiety and depression!

Removes unsightly moles!

Arthritis! Snoring! Diarrhea! Acne! Diabetes! Removes warts! Mighraines! Lose weight! Alcoholism! Glaucoma!

IT CURES CANCER! All forms of cancer!

And all without any detrimental effects whatsoever!

Add to the extravagant medical claims, the additional accusation that you can’t get this treatment because of a conspiracy by BigPharma and greedy, grasping doctors who want people to suffer so they can charge them lots of money to fix them with agonising tortures that don’t work.

Are you suspicious yet?

These are all claims Rick Simpson and a small group of Canadians make for hemp oil in this video.

You may not want to watch it — I’ve already given you the gist of it, and it’s repetitious and very poorly edited (hint: just because your home movie editing software has a lot of exotic transitions, doesn’t mean you have to use them all). It looks like an infomercial, with a parade of Nova Scotians offering wild anecdotal claims of all the stuff a daily dose of hemp oil cures. These testimonials are presented as the evidence that hemp oil is medically efficacious; they aren’t. Quite the opposite, actually — it all says to me that the promoters found some marginally sick people and fed their desire for wish-fulfillment, and got a slew of meaningless accolades and bizarre conspiracy theories that tell me that what’s going on here is psychology, not medicine.

It’s not just religion that kills people. I watched Rick Simpson claim that he had skin cancer, and that rubbing his marijuana extract healed the lesions overnight, and I thought… people may well die from watching and believing this claim. Some forms of skin cancer (melanoma) are extremely aggressive and dangerous — do not delay, do not play games with weird magic topical creams, get a real doctor to check it out.

The information on the video also gives off a bad vibe.

The following presentation of RUN FROM THE CURE: The Rick Simpson Story was made possible by Rick Simpson and video producer Christian Laurette… made for free to teach YOU how to heal yourself of disease and illness using cannabinoids.

Comments will be moderated to protect those who need this information. We are not asking anyone if it works, we are telling you it works; it is not a debate. Too many uneducated people coming to this channel to speak their mind on a life-saving plant they know nothing about and giving bad advice and in many cases making horrible remarks about the people who brought the information out to you.

No argument! If you disagree with him, you’re uneducated…despite the fact that the pro side consists of rural citizens who seem to know nothing about how to interpret evidence, while his opponents are doctors and scientists.

The video also lies, lies, lies. I’ve often heard quacks say this: “FACT: Chemotherapy kills more people than it saves.” It’s not true. People who are on chemotherapy are more likely to die than people who are not on it, because the only reason those people are on chemotherapy in the first place is that they are really, really sick. It makes nonsensical claims: “THC attacks mutated cells while rejuvenating healthy ones”. How do they know? These aren’t scientists making the claims, these are ordinary townspeople — Simpson makes his formula by doing a crude extraction with naptha or isopropyl alcohol in a bucket he stirs with a stick, and boils it down to an oily residue in a rice cooker (there will be an explosion and fire at his house someday, I predict). He has no tools to examine specific cellular responses, so the source of these claims of a mechanism are being taken directly out of his ass.

At least Simpson is giving his cure-all away for free — all he’s doing is feeding his over-inflated ego at the potential cost of a few lives. He’s not quite like the odious Burzynski Clinic, which bilks people for hundreds of thousands of dollars for an extravagantly promoted therapy that has no good evidence for its efficacy. And at least he has not resorted to threats.

But he’s still a dangerous quack and a crank.

One other thing: I’m all in favor of legalizing marijuana and ending the phony drug war that turns harmless folk into criminals, jacks up the cost, and entices violent thugs into what ought to be simple farming. If you look up Rick Simpson, though, you find all these groups advocating legalization also buying into Simpson’s hazardous and dishonest game. That only discredits the legalization movement.

(Also on Sb)

Why I am an atheist – Mark Gisleson

As a child I was a devout Lutheran. I studied my catechism lessons and the Bible. We had good pastors who explained that Genesis should not be taken literally, and that science and the Bible were completely compatible.

Then I got to high school. It was the late ’60s and the church started taking back what it had taught me. It was OK to kill. Wealth meant God loved you. Women were only deserving of respect if they played their roles and didn’t make a fuss. Ditto minorities.

Leaving the church made me stronger, and the church weaker.

The church is very weak now, yet I’ve never felt better.

I don’t miss God at all. Any of them.

Mark Gisleson
United States

A new cure for HIV? Oops, no, just an old scam

The technique ought to make people suspicious.

The healing process involves the pastor shouting over the person being healed for the devil to come out of their body, while spraying water in their face.

One of the pastors, Rachel Holmes, told Sky’s reporter Shatila, who is a genuine HIV sufferer, they had a 100% success rate.

Ms Holmes said: “We have many people that contract HIV. All are healed.”

She said, if symptoms such as vomiting or diarrhoea persist, it is actually a sign of the virus leaving the body.

Quackery gets smuggled in under the guise of godliness, and somehow people think that makes it perfectly reasonable.

The consequences are not reasonable, however: at least six people are known to have died because they stopped taking their medication for AIDS after these contemptible liars told them they were cured: in the article, one gullible gay man admits to having infected his boyfriend with HIV after being told he was HIV free.

One final non-surprise:

The Synagogue Church of All Nations is wealthy. It has branches across the globe and its own TV channel.

On its website, it promotes its anointing water, which is used during the healing, and it also makes money from merchandise, such as DVDs, CDs and books.

Church members are expected to give regular donations.

Why I am an atheist – Elias Ahmed Serulle

My parents found God (He’s lost a lot for an omnipresent being, wouldn’t you say?) when I was around 14. Seeing how important this was for them, I tried to foster that “perfect” family image by taking God into my life. For 8-and-some years I was part of youth group, and later baptized (by choice) as an Evangelical Christian. I did all of this with a deluded belief (not only the God one) that being part of this would bring my family closer. Only a teenager could think that healthy relationships could be built on lies…

In that time I never stopped asking questions; enough questions to attract the attention of the Youth Group Leader, a minister’s wife with a touch for making delicious chocolate-chip cookies. I think she always knew I’d end up on the dark side, far from her cookies. She was determined on showing me the life stories of men and women, atheists them all, that had found (again, His Almighty Ass is lost) God and repented from their sinful ways. I thank God (figure of speech, people) for attending this group though. Out of the 13 teens that attended, 7 are now strong atheists. I’m pretty sure our conversations led to this in one way or another.

My parents have become more and more involved with church, and I’ve grown farther apart from it. They hold prayers before every event, church group on Thursdays at home; my dad has even been invited to give sermons at church. It’s not that sweet a deal for me, you’d say. We grow further apart in our ideologies, but thankfully our relationship as a family has grown somewhat stronger. I’ve yet to tell them my (dis)belief because it’s what they stand for. God easily makes up for half of what they do on a daily basis. My brothers and I have had talks, but not blunt ones. Little by little I do away with their blind faith, in a soft-spoken manner, like when the dentist tells you gently that something’s not going to hurt. They look up to my parents a lot, so confrontation is in my interest, just not at this stage in their lives. But it’s coming quite soon.

My country’s another obstacle for free thought. There are some small communities that foster this kind of thinking, but as a whole the Dominican Republic is made of devout Catholics. You might not be a church-goer, and there’d be nothing wrong with that, but as soon as you express your atheism clearly, you’re an outcast of the (theoretically) healthy community.

I could give a hundred reasons for my atheism, but they’d all boil down to basic curiosity. Asking enough of the right questions will, in my opinion, eventually lead you down to atheism’s (or at the very least, agnosticism’s) door. Why do the good die young? Why is there poverty? How does Fox News still continue to exist? 42?

I wish, from the bottom of my heart that this war, one of attrition, between rationality and irrationality (and not that good vs evil crap) would be over. My atheism is one part of me and it doesn’t entirely define who I am; my way of thinking brought me to atheism, not the other way around.

Thing is, I hate being angry because some loud-mouthed evangelical is riding a 60-feet-tall “high horse” and judging people as if they were God. I hate being angry at basic civil and human rights being discarded for groups that are object of God’s wrath in the years before electricity. I hate listening to religious folk forgive, in theory, those who cross them, but then turning around and siccing God upon their enemies as if He were their very own, private avenger. I hate being angry at the stupidity that surrounds me, but until it’s dealt with I don’t think I’ve got much of a choice.

And these people are sometimes funny to watch (in a Crocodile-Dundee-wild-animals-let-loose kind of way).

Elias Ahmed Serulle
Dominican Republic

Islamic embryology: overblown balderdash

I have read the entirety of Hamza Andreas Tzortzis’ paper, Embryology in the Qur’an: A scientific-linguistic analysis of chapter 23: With responses to historical, scientific & popular contentions, all 58 pages of it (although, admittedly, it does use very large print). It is quite possibly the most overwrought, absurdly contrived, pretentious expansion of feeble post hoc rationalizations I’ve ever read. As an exercise in agonizing data fitting, it’s a masterpiece.

Here, let me give you the short version…and I do mean short. This is a paper that focuses with obsessive detail on all of two verses from the Quran. You heard me right: the entirety of the embryology in that book, the subject of this lengthy paper, is two goddamned sentences, once translated into English.

We created man from an essence of clay, then We placed him as a drop of fluid in a safe place. Then We made that drop of fluid into a clinging form, and then We made that form into a lump of flesh, and We made that lump into bones, and We clothed those bones with flesh, and later We made him into other forms. Glory be to God the best of creators.

Seriously, that’s it. You have just mastered all of developmental biology, as taught by Mohammed.

[Read more…]

Why I am an atheist – Leela Moses

I am an atheist because I cannot see any logical reason to be otherwise.

I was raised new age/pagan and used karma to explain why my life was such a mess as I became a heavy drug user and drinker.

I always enjoyed laughing at silly Christian beliefs, but once I gave up drugs and cleared my mind I started to turn that same skeptical eye on to my own beliefs, and found them just as laughable, if not more so.

Despite the 12 step program telling the world the only way to get clean is through god, I found that without drugs clouding my senses god became irrelevant.

Leela Moses
New Zealand

Another wildly successful billboard campaign!

It really is magic. Whenever atheists put up one of their innocuous billboards, with some mild statement that I find tepid and utterly uncontroversial, the Christians just have to charge in and make it newsworthy. The latest case is in Ohio, where Mid Ohio Atheists planned to put up this billboard:

At the last minute, though, the billboard company yanked their agreement to put up the signs and cancelled the contract. Why?

…the inflammatory nature of the proposed displays would no doubt be considered offensive to much of the community and would be harmful to Lind’s community reputation and goodwill. Lind has always and will continue to reserve the right not to publish advertisements which, in its sole opinion, are obscene, unnecessarily offensive and/or not in the best interests of the community at large.

Oh, yeah, that sign sure is obscene and offensive.

But hooray! The theists have successfully inflamed the issue and made their discrimination the focus of the news! It’s so obliging of them to stand up, put on the big black hat, and paint themselves as the villains.

(Also on Butterflies & Wheels, Blag Hag, and X Blog.)