Why Feminism Part 1 (Snow White)

Eggs aren't chickens.

Fox schools its viewers on gas prices

Why Atheism (part 1)

Please see my livejournal for sources, links, and to comment <3 or simply “ask” here if you wish!

Who I am? For those of you who don’t know, I’m an atheist, a vegan most of the time, a liberal… a fan of indie media… a dog person, a college student, an American with Eastern European ethnicity, a peace corps volunteer hopeful, a fan of philosophy, art, politics, and cooking… I grew up in the 90s, a product of the television, a girl of the future. I grew up playing video games, watching bad sitcoms, with a flannel shirt on. I’m a collaboration of different titles, messages, pathways, and meanings. But above all, I am someone who deeply despises ignorance.

I argue a lot and debate a lot with people who have opposing spiritual ideas, and I’ve realized something… None of these people ever explain why they believe or support something, outside of any theoretical nonsense. There is never any evidence, any reasons beyond feeling or emotions, or traditions. Me: “Why do you believe in God?” Them: “Because of the bible.” Another way to put it, Me: “Why do you prefer peperoni pizza over anchovy pizza?” Them: “Because it’s all I’ve ever eaten.” or “Because I’ve never had anchovy pizza.” or “Because anchovy pizza obviously is gross!” or “Because my mom told me anchovies are bad for you.” The list goes on, the reason is never, “Because anchovy pizza has higher calories and I’m watching my weight.” (Or, “Because there is evidence supporting that God is real.”; and then offering whatever evidence that might be) There is no real reason. Saying you believe in Santa because your parents told you is not a reason to believe in Santa, in fact, it’s a reason to question Santa’s existence!

So I thought I would compile why I believe what I believe and what my reasons are behind those beliefs, to see if I fall victim to the same lack of support. I also will contrast and provide arguments which the opposing beliefs use and support. If anyone disagrees or sees contradictions or has any problems with my logic, please click “ASK” (or “Leave a comment” on LJ)! I would love to have a real discussion and not a one sided statement that goes nowhere. I’m going to start with the first question regarding my position in the world…

Why am I an atheist?

I was not originally an atheist. I’ve spent most of my life trying to believe in something, as a child I was Roman Catholic but the moment I realized other religions existed, I took off running. I read up on Hinduism, Buddhism, Wiccan, and Taoism, I even took some mythologies seriously. At some point I realized I had stopped believing in a god a long time ago, and thus I called myself an atheist. But I was only an atheist because I didn’t believe in God; I didn’t have any interest in religion so there was no other term to use. Not wanting to be a hypocrite and exist in ignorance, I began a journey that I continue today, discovering why I am an atheist.

1). First, it is important to understand why you believe what you do and why you follow the guidelines that you follow. Let’s have a brief history lesson… (this rant will mostly be directed at Christianity, as that is essentially the sum of all other religions in the Western world).

The oldest beliefs are thought to be essentially very simple goddess worship. People lived in very small communities and once they stopped being nomadic, they became an agricultural society (as opposed to a hunting society - in which they mostly worshiped animals, or saw animals and nature in a simplistic paranormal manner). But religions as we know them today didn’t start to really evolve until the agricultural society did, meaning the use of rituals, stories, and explanations for why things are as they are.

Goddess worship basically involved worshiping Mother Nature. The patriarchal religions of today originated all in the same context, which is that you had to give offerings to the mother goddess in order to have a harvest. Women were the most important figures of this time, they were the child-bearers and since the primitive man had no idea what was going on with this birthing process - women were essentially magical. They could do something that no man could do, and there was apparently no explanation for it. This was a great time for women, they were highly respected. The oldest spiritual statues are all of robust women (from 35,000 BCE! That’s approximately 31,000 years before the Sumerians!)

Common elements in these early beliefs were large women, sacrifices to the female goddess (often Kings, or leaders), and generally the base line for every major mythological female figurehead which eventually arose (for example, in Greek Mythology, it’s believed Hera used to be a goddess who was worshiped in the same way that Greeks eventually worshiped Zeus - she had been of the utmost significance and was eventually turned into an annoying, jealous wife).

Eventually, the miracle of birth, spring, and life, grew uninspiring. The society grew larger, and thus baby-making lost its charm. The society still needed its harvest, but it began to look elsewhere. As it got bigger, it needed to protect itself. Although there have been and continue to be small remote communities run by women alone, most communities were not, women simply aren’t violent by nature. Women had always taken on a more domesticated role, raising children, tending the field, and keeping everyone fed. When they were worshiped, this is what they did and what they were worshiped for. So who is to defend the village? The men, of course; Strong, able to look death in the eye without flinching, these were the people who could protect the women and children from other evolving communities.

Thus, modern mythology as we know was born. Of course it was not regarded as a mythology at the time; these were serious religions that were regarded with the utmost respect. The oldest and unarguably the most violent religion began roughly around 3300 BCE, the Sumerian civilization.

Now I won’t hold your hand and teach you how to walk, let me just summarize the progression of myth into religion.

All mythologies had common plots, and ideas. The flood myth, for example, which appears in the Book of Genesis and the Quran and also the Hindu story of Manu (Judaism and Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism respectively). The first written down account of this myth is from the Sumerians (dated approximately around 2000 BCE) in the Epic of Gilgamesh. It appears in all major mythologies, from the Aztecs to the Greek and Roman, to China, and virtually everywhere. A flood ravished the earth, and lasted for a significant amount of time, in China, for example, it continued two generations which is 40 years, in the Christian bible it appears that there was flooding for 40 days but remained static for 150 days (otherwise the passages in Genesis are simply conflicting). Each flood myth has the same elements, one person, who is pure and righteous, is told by the divine that there will be a flood and the divine gives the person specific instructions on how to build and boat and what to bring with him. The person does what they’re told, the flood comes and kills everyone, the person makes a sacrifice and they are to repopulate the earth. Same story, same characters, different dialect. Even small details like the releasing of a bird to find land carries throughout history. What of Noah? A pure man is told by the divine to build a boat, take some stuff with him, and Noah does, lives and repopulates the Earth. The list of flood myths and their similarities is staggering. Yes, one could easily say that a real flood did occur and someone was saved and caused all of these stories to occur, but the Christian bible says that everyone else died. In fact most of the religions simply state that everyone else died. Yet all of these stories involve different people, on different continents, saving different things, being saved in different ways; From Africa, to the Americas, to China. The credibility of one person, out of all those stories, was the only person to survive and live to tell about it, is just ridiculous.

There are many excuses at this point in which a person can make. My favorite is this, “Remnant elements of truth existing within the miscellaneous religions … all civilizations came from one common root. … it would be consistent with this … to believe that God gave the flood account to Moses … to disprove the other accounts in circulation.” I kind of butchered those three paragraphs but it remains in context and a link is provided. Essentially the argument is that obviously everyone knows about this one flood because everyone used to live next to each other and God only told Moses to correct the previous stories. Tada! Yes, we all did originate in Africa and we all did have a common ancestor. But by the time these flood myths started rolling out, the oldest known flood story was around 4000 to 2000 BCE, and it was the Sumerians in Mesopotamia that wrote it down. Homo sapiens (that’s us) have existed for 195,000-100,000 years (approximately). So for some 100,000 years or so, we have been playing telephone? Passing on a story about a flood? What can be explanation for THAT? Have you seen telephone played? Not to mention there has for some time been a theory that at one point in history, there were as little as 15,000 human beings left alive after a massive volcanic eruption in74,000 BCE, although this has been debated. It still remains that there was a “bottle neck” effect on the human population, which just means the human population was significantly reduced. So only 25% of the student body at the University of Michigan (25% of +/- 40,000 students = 10,000) survived, and they’re supposed to remember some story when they’re on the brink of extinction? And this is 74,000 years before Jesus was ever born. And even if Moses was told by God, how did everyone else know the story? God obviously didn’t tell them because they got it “wrong”.So why do they have flood stories that follow identical premises?

Ignoring all the other little details in the bible, and other religions, that coincide also with mythology, let’s focus on the big guy: Jesus.

From the dawn of myth, there have always been dying Gods. Real live kings were sacrificed for them, for the harvest. Every winter, the plants would die. But the people had hope, because in the spring, the God would come back and so would life. Now I’m not going to talk about the many similarities Jesus has with previous deities because it’s too easy to argue about it, in fact here is a website that gives examples of what I’m talking about and even offers links to the other argument. I’m not talking about that, about the similarities of actual details and descriptions. I’m talking about the extremely deep and long history of what we refer to as The Dying God. We start with the Sumerian dying god Dumuzi and Inanna. I highly recommend you read the story if you are not aware of it. Inanna spends three days and three nights in the underworld, until finally she gets rescued, to skip to the chase, her husband Dumuzi spends 6 months in the underworld while Inanna gets to be free, and then they switch places. (When Dumuzi is in the underworld, it’s winter, and when Inanna is in the underworld, it’s summer).

There is the Norse myth of Baldr, who is the most beautiful god, his mother has everyone make promises not to harm him after having a nightmare that he would die (of course Loki gets out of this, and a mistletoe does too). Well long story short, Baldr dies. He only can come back when the world weeps for him (the thawing of spring). Hoder, his twin brother, also dies, causing winter. (Or, Baldr remains in the underworld (causing winter) until the end of the world, whose return brings back spring, depending on whether or not you believe that the Christians played around with the story).

There are so many dying god stories, just check out Wiki for a small handful of them. My point is, what is Jesus? Jesus comes into the world and does his business, and then sacrifices himself (essentially, he commits suicide) for the well being of humanity. This is no different than the practices of ancient times when Kings were killed for purposes of fertility, eventually, obviously, this practice changed significantly (what King wants to die?) and it eventually turned into something non-fatal. But following the natural patterns of mythology, the stories, from any location on the global, and their translation to religion - it’s impossible not to catch onto the strange but logical progression. Jesus was a dying god, a man made creation. Why else would all these stories follow the same patterns, details, and likeness of one another?

Because this is quite wordy, I think I will close here. However I am not nearly finished, so I will continue at a future date.