Resisting Pest Control

The religious regard us as pests and they treat us accordingly. Some religious people still harbour the desire to exterminate unbelievers while others go for alternative strategies that involve isolation, decontamination and neutering.

The religious are very keen to tell us atheists that we have no reason to be moral, no reason to marry and that a married atheist is a hypocrite. They also want us to accept the idea that life without a god, particularly their god, is totally futile so we might as well kill ourselves now and be done with it. All these ideas are designed to sap our morale and to get us to give up living and breeding and so leave the faithful to inherit the Earth. Sod that.

The faithful have no right to this world, they claim to be interested in another world, let them have that one, this world should belong to those who believe in it. Do you believe in life before death? I believe in no other kind, that is why this life is precious to me.

There are a very large number of ways to be dead, a large number of ways to be only partially sentient and an infinite number of ways never to be alive. Life is precious. Have you ever owned anything precious that was not a gift? Of course. Just because something is precious it does not follow that it is a gift or that something or somebody needs to be thanked.

Have you ever tried for a baby? Trust me, it's very like having sex. I find the idea that my children should thank me for creating them to be something quite absurd. “Thanks for having me” is something you say to your friends' parents when you've been staying at their house. It is not something you say to your own parents. I wanted to have children, to be a father, for as long as I can remember. Asking why I wanted children is very hard to answer. I suppose it is a hard-wired position. I have never considered the option of not having children. All my aunts and uncles had children and most of my friends in childhood had siblings. Having children, and more than one at that, seemed utterly normal. It was an unquestioned norm.

The religious, certainly most denominations, encourage you to have children. The priests, imams and pastors see your procreation, quite shrewdly, as their retirement plan. With every mouth comes a pair of hands to pray and drop coins on the offertory plate, with every child comes a new pliant mind to make the home of the memes they feed. In Catholicism celibate priests procreate by insemination by donor, in some cases they don't even use Catholic's semen as they insist that any of the girls in their harem, sorry, congregation, only put out to husbands who will promise to infect their own children with a Catholic education. Do you object to my biological imagery? Tough. The truth doesn't care for your squeamishness. The primary method by which religions spread is infection within the home. Converts are always a small minority, most get their religion from their parents. Religion is not genetic, it is not in your genes but you get it from your family as surely as you get your class and your mother tongue from your family.

Why should the primary method of spreading ideas be for the irrational only? I do not encourage anybody to indoctrinate their children but please, rational atheists, have some children. Give it a go. We should not have to rely solely on converts as if we were a new cult. Cults that embrace the meme of celibacy usually wither and die rather quickly.

In Britain mainstream Protestant Christianity has become softer and more open, valuing tolerance and being embarrassed by dogma. This has been a slow suicide that is continuing still. Christianity has lost its way and is in terminal decline, those who value freedom, tolerance and openness must recognize that these virtues are not Christian virtues but secular civilized virtues and no good is done by mixing a dying religion up in the defence of civilized values that have never been inspired by religion. Christian values are obedience to imagined voices inside, piety, faith, meekness, resisting the joys of life (called the sins of the flesh) and preaching this sick and twisted way of life to other people. Democracy, respect for truth, openness, enterprise and rationality, the stuff which really made western civilization great, have nothing to do with Christianity at all. They are liberal and secular values.

The religious are always on the lookout for any opportunity to paste the image of their god over any product which is in demand. Christians stole the winter festivals of Europe and named them Christmas, everything that cannot be suppressed has to be labelled as their property. Christianity cannot suppress tolerance, liberalism, freethinking, democracy or capitalism so instead the whole package is relabelled as “Christian civilization” when the reality is that democracy and the rest are mostly pre-Christian inventions or much more recent developments which required advanced functional civilizations to blossom. Liberalism, the free market, equality of the sexes and races, freedom of thought, the scientific method, respect for evidence, logic and reason are all things which came to Europe, America and the rest of the free world and grew up alongside Christianity. There is nothing inherently Christian in what we see as modern western civilized values and the great Christian thinkers were not the sources for these ideas, aspirations and systems of thought. Many of the greatest proponents of modern civilized values were strangers to the church who stood as far from traditional dogmatism as either a prudent sense of self preservation or the scientific consensus would allow.

What have you got to live for if you don't believe in God?

Some Christians actually think this rhetorical question is a knock-down argument for Christianity. It is utterly absurd to think that a finite life is not worth living. Is it futile to sow the seeds of a flower which will die before the next winter? My Christian father and grandfather didn't think so and neither do I. Is it futile to own a pet who is likely to die before you do? No. If something is worth having it is worth having for as long as it can be had. People routinely spend thousands of pounds on a holiday that is all over in two weeks. If something had to be eternal to be of value there would be no florists, no travel agents, no tanning salons, no hairdressers, beauticians, cosmetic surgeons and pet shops. Fiat and Ford would just be four letter words, like Rust.

Life doesn't have to be eternal to be valuable and in many ways the value of every hour, day and year is greater when they are limited. How many times have we been shown in fiction the special value of a few short hours of shared experience? It is a classic element of many war films. We know how the imminence of death makes life taste sweeter and gives precious hours special meaning. How much money is spent each year in travelling to the bedsides of the dying? I know I spent many hours travelling to see my mother in hospital when she was in intensive care after a catastrophic car crash.

If you have an old car which has not been designed to meet modern safety standards get rid of it before you don't live to regret it. My mother would not have survived a crash of that nature in an earlier generation of car of that size. Crumple zones, safety cells and airbags save lives. And if you can't afford a newer car at least register as an organ donor. My mother has recovered now and the last time I saw her she saw there had been a serious road accident, on Christmas Day, and the next day she relayed news of a successful lung transplant at a nearby hospital. It might just have been a coincidence but that doesn't stop me drawing a moral lesson. Register as an organ donor. Tell your close family your wishes. It doesn't matter if you're old, fat, alcoholic, diabetic or a smoker they'll probably find something they can use. You recycle your cans and jars don't you? Corneas, kidneys, lungs, livers and hearts are more valuable.

In what way is obeying rules living a life? We rightly regard slavery as a bad thing and yet somehow the religious are trying to tell us that our life isn't worth living unless we are living to surrender to the will of an unseen self-appointed master. Sod that for a game of soldiers. My life is valuable because I have freedom. If I didn't have freedom, if I was a slave, it would have less value. Not wanting to be a slave is not an argument against the existence of gods, my whims can't affect the existence or otherwise of anything unless it is in my power to create or destroy them. Obviously gods don't require the cooperation of believers in order to exist, that's a philosophical non-starter even if it is a central plank in the structure of many works of fantasy fiction including the Discworld series.

The idea that living a life within the cage set by a god is a less eligible existence than the life of a free individual cannot be used to justify the basic premise of atheism, it is merely a response to the know-nothing-and-believe-anythings of this world who think that a life without God is meaningless. The existence or non-existence of gods is not affected by beliefs or whims of people. Wanting to be safe in God's protection or wanting sinners punished doesn't create God and wanting to be free to drink and fornicate does not make him go away if he's there. Many religious people think that if they raise the stakes high enough everybody will come around to believing in their invisible friend by the power of threats and bribes. Eternity of unspeakable torture is a rather severe punishment, too much for any modern state to stomach even for deliberate mass murder and yet according to some preachers that is what awaits people who go three times every Sunday to the wrong flavour of Southern Baptist church or even those who go to the right flavour church but wish their wife had breasts as firm as the ones the Pastor bought for his wife. The less evidence there is for the existence of divine justice and an afterlife the bigger the bribes and threats had to become but they had already reached 72 virgins and paradise on the one hand and regrowing flesh to have it burned off again on the other a millennium and a half ago. There is nowhere else to go, the stakes are as high as the human imagination allows and yet still people carry on fornicating, stealing, bribing and killing as if they didn't believe what they proclaim they would die to defend.

It is absurd to claim that I hope that there is no afterlife while I secretly know there is one. There is a suppressed fear that there is one just as I have a suppressed fear of werewolves but suppressing that fear is easy, it takes no more mental effort than suppressing thoughts about stabbing the bloke in front of me in the queue for the bank. Entertain thoughts and they'll return the favour. I have no more fear of waking up dead than I have of waking up in somebody else's body. The impossible happens fifty times or more per week on television but never at all in reality.

If anybody asks you, as an atheist, what have you got to live for ask them who they think will have the fullest day tomorrow the twenty year old man who lives in Paris and works as a baker or the twenty year old soldier with one day's leave in Paris before going to the trenches. We know deep in our innermost being that life is worth living and experiences are worth having. Taking away the urgency from life by granting an eternal life (with no freedom, living out God's agenda not your own) does nothing to make this life more valuable or more worth living. As an atheist there is only one life to live with nothing to follow it just as there was nothing before it. The eternity of nothing has no meaning but your life can have all the meaning you choose to stuff into it.

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Resisting Pest Control

What have you got to live for if you don't believe in God?

Atheism | Politics | Memes | Mind | Matters | Interact | Feedback | Email | Links | Search | Forum | Home

© 1999 - 2010 by Martin Willett.

mwillett.org: Debate Unlimited