Join the club. Get the shirt.

Hey Michael -

You say you're a Christian, and believe in God and Jesus Christ too.  Do you believe that Jesus Christ IS God (as most Christian sects do)?  When you say you believe in them, does that mean you think they exist, or you are behind the things they represent (as in, "I believe in Freedom" - would mean that I'm FOR freedom, not necessarily that I believe it exists everywhere).

Michael, I don't want to belittle what you believe.  I want for you the same thing that your God, through his apostle, Paul, said he wanted for you -- "For I do not desire, brethren, that you should be ignorant of this mystery."  And, yes, I am fully aware of how much that hurts.  There was a study done at Emory University in January of 2006 that proved through fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) that the brain rewards itself with neurochemicals similar to drugs when it holds on to emotionally-charged preconceived opinions.  To quote from the article:

Once partisans had come to completely biased conclusions -- essentially finding ways to ignore information that could not be rationally discounted -- not only did circuits that mediate negative emotions like sadness and disgust turn off, but subjects got a blast of activation in circuits involved in reward -- similar to what addicts receive when they get their fix.

So, Michael, I'm sure you feel uncomfortable when you don't get the addictive fix that you would get from your church brothers and sisters.  However, chemical delusions are rarely "good" for living things, despite how pleasing they may be.

 Actually, I don't claim I'm being persecuted.  I ceased wallowing in victim mentality when I abandoned my faith in a world view based on martyrdom. (I know those might be difficult words for your to understand, so I'll make it a little simpler - when I quit believing in a religion that glorifies being used, I quit feeling persecuted).  As for being a hypocrit, that's one of the milder names atheists have been labeled.  Usually we're labeled as sinners damned to eternal torment by people like you and by the book that you follow.

That's not what the Bible says about God, Michael.  The Bible says that God is evident everywhere, and so that even people who have never heard of him have no excuse for not believing, because he makes himself so visible to all.  But then, you and I know differently, right?  The fact remains that there are no signs of a god...not even a weak one...that is evident to anyone who isn't imagining it.  So, Mike, what do you do with Romans 1:20?  Do you claim that God lied when He said in his book that His attributes are are clearly seen, or do you say that He's NOT hiding?  You can't have it both ways.

Life isn't a struggle when you accept it as it is, rather than as you were led to believe it should be.  Michael, I think you're struggling because you were led to believe that life is a struggle.  What if I told you that somebody lied to you when they told you it was a struggle, and that life is pretty resilient, that life continues in the face of astronomical mathematical odds--people "attempt" suicide all the time, and most of the time they fail, because LIFE is strong--the will to keep going is extremely powerful.  Life survives floods, droughts, famine, disease...it just keeps on keeping on.  It's truly a beautiful thing, and that's why I have real issues with an imaginary diety who says "He who loves his life will lose it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life."  If somebody hated their life in this world, why would they want one for all eternity?  That doesn't make sense.  The jist of that scripture is to hate yourself, and, Michael, I'm not going to do that, because I know that life is good; that people don't need a god to know how to love each other, and have respect for each other.  In fact, it's the monotheistic religions of the world that have prevented human beings from reaching out to each other as brothers and sisters -- people who share with each other one and only one life on this lonely planet. 

 Well, Michael, there is wisdom in every Dr. Seuss book I ever read, too; that doesn't mean I'm going to worship the Cat in the Hat.  There are also contradictions in the scriptures, and there are things that flat go against science, therefore proving God to not be all-knowing, all-loving, and all-present.  The scriptures say the only way for people to "behave" is to be punished, but science has taught us that people don't have free will -- that we respond to our brain chemicals, and our genetics, and our environment in extremely predictable ways, and that the BEST way to get people to behave is to immediately reward them when the proper behavior is exhibited (remember those brain chemicals I told you about at the beginning of my letter?  They're stronger than any book about a firey eternal punishment). 

 If your God were all-loving, and all-knowing, He would have made a way for ALL people to believe in Him and follow Him by making brain chemicals that would reward the body the same way it does when it eats when it's hungry, and sleeps when it's tired.  He either didn't understand his creature, or he's hateful towards some of his creatures, or most likely (and the conclusion that I've come to) he doesn't exist, and that he was "invented" by men to control weaker men through fear.

Jesus (in the Bible) said that perfect love casts out fear...so why did He need to invent a "Hell" an eternal punishment for people to fear, if what he wanted was for everyone to have perfect love?

 You're god is crazy, Michael.  And He hates life.  I hope some day you find something a little more positive and loving to put your hope in.

I wouldn't care about religion at all if it didn't seem remiss not to. I was content being a disinterested agnostic until I realized what was at stake, who was making the decisions and what those decisions were based on. I think there's sufficient reason to assume all the popular religions are fictions, and where those fictions do no harm I don't care either way. I don't accost people on the street and ask them whether they've rejected Jesus today. But the religious moderates, the nominal believers, have a fringe of literalists speaking for them (and through public policy, speaking for us all) in advocacy of indefensible positions with the potential to harm, hinder and divide society in ways that will cause unecessary suffering and ignorance.
Religion holds zero interest for me, and I get no particular pleasure from rejecting it. In fact, I risk alienating some of my (nominally) Catholic family members by simply admitting my position. I'm overwhelmed, however, by the realization that we can't sit idly by while something that fails in even in a ballpark estimate of the real world tries to override thousands of years of accumulated knowledge in determining how we approach life.

Isn't Anselms argument something like:

It was meant to be a tongue in cheek response.  I was only aware of Aslem's ontology and derivitives of it so was just turning it around.