Hello, I would like to share with you some of my thoughts about religion. In the long run it is safer for us as a species to all have the same religion. Having the same religion eliminates the conflicts between people that are caused by religion. Everywhere in the world people are becoming more and more educated. Because of this in 50 years from now it will be trivial for millions of people from all over the world to build nuclear weapons and genetically modify viruses and bacteria. This poses a great danger for us as a species.
The best religions in my opinion are Christianity and Buddhism. A better option than to be religious is to be an atheist. Convincing people to change from one religion to another is very difficult. Changing people to atheism is easier than changing people from one religion to another. I believe that the right logical ideas should be able to convert anyone to atheism in a matter of minutes. My goal is to find a set of ideas that could fit on two pages and which if read by a person of any religion would make this person an atheist. A person should be able to understand these ideas in the same way a mathematician understands the demonstration of a theorem. Once they understand the ideas they should not be able to go back to the old beliefs. Here are some of my ideas about Christianity. Similar ideas could be written about other religions. 1. God knows the future so he knows how a person is going to behave during his or her life even from the moment he or she is born. So God already knows if we are going to hell or to heaven when we are born. The question is why not put people directly in heaven or hell? 2. Religious people say that there is God (good) and there is the Devil (evil). The problem is that God created the Devil. God knew exactly how this devil he was going to create will behave because God knows the future. So the Christian God is evil himself for creating the Devil. 3. The Bible was created by regular people. All of them were man. Those who decided what to put in the Bible optimized for certain effects for the Bible to have when they chose what texts to add. 4. Christian people believe that God wants them to pray. Why would God want people to pray to him? There is nothing he can do with people's prayers. They don't make him happier because his happiness is at maximum anyway. 5. There is no text written by Jesus in the Bible. I believe that this was done on purpose by those who created the Bible. If people saw a text written by Jesus they would become less religious. Seeing a text written by Jesus would make Jesus more trivial. On the other hand we are told only about the miracles Jesus made. 6. What is the right religion and what are the right Gods or God? Most people in the world have the religion of their parents. This happened by chance and not because they chose based on better evidence. 7. People are not moral because they are religious. They are moral because they are born that way and because they are educated in schools to be that way. They are moral because this helps them to have friends and good lives. Most of the time people do what is moral just because there are laws. 8. We should not believe in the writings made 2000 years ago because they are not better than the ones that are made today. Many Christian people believe that God spoke throw people 2000 years or so ago. I believe that to be false. In any case, it should be as probable for God to speak throw people these days as it was 2000 years ago. 9. In my opinion there is no heaven and hell. It is said that the Christian God is the absolute good in the world so he should permit everyone to go to heaven. If he doesn't permit everyone to go to heaven then he must be evil. All bad people are bad because their genes or their education make them that way. So if they are bad it is not their fault. We can't chose neither our genes nor our education in the first years of life. If there was a heaven all people should be allowed to get there no matter what they do in life. 10. Religious people lose a lot of time by going to church. They also lose a lot of money by building churches that cost millions of dollars each instead of building more schools and hospitals. By building more schools we can double their number. This would allow us to teach groups of 10-15 children at once instead of teaching 20-30 children at once. This would greatly increase the level of education in every country where this is done. If you have the time to write please let me know what are your opinions about religions. Regards, Michael Smith _______________________________________________ pydotorg-www mailing list pydotorg-www@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pydotorg-www
