A simple statement that summed up everything.
A few weeks ago, a *gasp* Facebook response to a question really stuck with me. The question was “Why do you think young people are leaving the church?” An atheist friend of my wife, whom I believe is dying of breast cancer, responded “Because it is based on a lie.”
This really took me aback. Here it is, a simple summation of everything that is wrong at the core of every religion, throughout history. It is based on a lie. The one unifying theme that all religions share is they are based on a lie. Even if people truly ‘believe’, it is a belief in a lie. This really reminded me why I lost any little faith I had many years ago. I realized it was just a bunch of made up lies and stories. Even before you get to the holy books of any religion, they are based on the lie that there is/are god(s). They don’t exist, they never existed. It happened to me in my biology class, studying how natural selection works. It was like a spark, wait, there is no need for a god to do anything? It all can be explained by natural processes. Evolution got me 99% of the way there. The only gap any god could hide in the Big Bang. Then I watched and read Cosmos, by Carl Sagan, and his beautiful explanation of how the universe came to be, and how the very atoms of my body came to be in the heart of a exploded star, closed the last gap, and my journey to atheism was complete.
As you can see, a simple statement, it is all based on a lie, touched me more than reading over a third of the dreadful bible. Just knowing it is all based on a lie almost makes me want to tear it apart more.