Most of my family is nominally Catholic. Only a few are hardcore Christians, and a few more make frequent vague references to religion. I've been been thinking about the word "god." It's a generic word, and in using it to refer to a specific mythological deity, it implies said deity has somehow risen to a level of legitimacy where it becomes synonymous with the generic word. In my head, I've been replacing all references to "god" with "Yahweh," or "Jehovah," or "Allah." That small shift in thinking has shown me, on an emotional level, how indistinct the Abrahamic faiths are from cults and obsolete mythologies.

I'm so confused by believers who feel threatened by a perceived lack of "meaning" in a secular outlook. It's been so long since I've asked questions about "meaning," and now it just seems so foolish to ask. We are simply awash in motives and purposes. If you can't find a purpose, I can only guess it's due to some nihilism perceived in the cartoon caricature most believers have of atheism. There are so many people that need help, so many things that need improvement, so many ways to improve conditions within our lifetimes, or for even longer views. I can't imagine doing anything for the sake of

I've recently come across a YouTube pundit (cross between Drew Carey and Rush Limbaugh: meaning he's fat, has a bad haircut, and thick glasses) who's basically rehashing the Kelly Tripplehorn "problem of induction" argument. He maxes out the video, talking for ten minutes, hemming and hawing with a lot of pseudo-intellectual demands that -- I don't know, it's hard to tell what he's trying to say. I guess he wants proof the universe doesn't need a "god." It's just... so mind-bendingly idiotic. It literally makes me feel light-headed dealing with so much double-talk.

Here's the rub: There's no evidence for "god." It's not that there's some controversey over how we're interpreting the evidence, there is no evidence.

During his debate with Christopher Hitchens, Al Sharpton couldn't get past the title of Hitchens's book, "God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything." Hitchens would make a comment about Christianity, Islam, etc., and Sharpton would stop him to interject, "Those are religions. You said 'God' is not great." As if to distinguish between the two was of gravest importance.

What do we know of this "god" thing apart from the descriptions (myriad contradicting descriptions) offered in religious texts? It's elementary to ask for proof of "god," and when none is offered (other than to play with words or call such a thing "necessary") what features does it offer us apart from those we know through the claims of religions?

The bulk of my family, on both sides, is Catholic. My mother's side is Italian: the people who invented Catholicism to market the tyranny of the state to the Christian rabble. And my father's side being Filipino: people who had Catholicism rammed down their throats by the marauding Spanish who invaded the archipelago some 500 odd years ago. Miraculously, I can count the number of times I've been to church on my hands; and they're all weddings, baptisms and funerals. Almost everyone in my family pays some kind of lip service to their religion. They're just normal people, not fanatics; which means living out the casual hypocrisy of being religious and having a mainstream life. It must be a weird situation.

After following the forums for some weeks, engaging in some "debates," and abusing some of the more bizarre believers, I've lost some interest in arguing about religion. Religions are completely artificial in origin, and fictional in content. If it isn't obvious to a person, there's something getting in the way of their seeing it objectively. Fear or tradition being the usual suspects. We don't need to carry the anthropomorphising of nature into the future, and neither should we dignify the question with elaborate debates. There is no cosmological/ontological/whatever explanation necessary to exclude the possibility of something there's no cause to even consider.

I'm growing more resistant to the deist/pantheist position. It always comes down to a handful of tiresome dead ends that beg the question. The "god of the gaps" keeps moving further off into the distance, scientific understanding nipping at its heels. As it always has, and will continue to until such nonsense is ruled out by our understanding of reality, or people come to their senses. Or maybe "everything" is "god": the insufferable redefinition of words, where a universe with "god" can't be distinguished from one without. The needless pantheist inference of a divine somethingoranother that did something for some reason, and one is and the same with all existence.

Grammastola is an apologist on YouTube. This means telling stories about some hypothetical guy you totally owned in a debate.

"So I says to the guy..."

If you comment on a video, he'll let your first comments through. After that, he'll reject any subsequent comments after his reply so he can tell people about the atheists left speechless by his YouTube profundity. If this guy's a Pinoy, I'm full of shame and indignation.

This theist wanted to learn about atheism. We all know the best way to learn about something is to talk at length about what you believe. Thanks to her, I know that Hindus are going to hell and atheists find their children "meaningless." She confessed to being afraid of what she would do if she didn't have Christianity as a moral compass and was left to decide her actions by herself.

She was particularly interested in talking to troubled young girls.