I don't agree with your website. I've read most of it, and couldn't find a conclusion to anything either. but then I guess everyone has their own opinions on things. bye :)

Conclusions:-

Life sucks, then you die.

Truth is absolute.

There doesn't have to be a point to any of this.

Real life is stranger than fiction, because fiction is suppossed to make sense.

I'll be smarter next week than last week, probably. But I will still get a lot wrong. That do you or you want something you can put on a T shirt? How about SHOOT THE NUNS FIRST.

Martin

PS if you want a debate give me something to get my teeth into.

i am here in california and i am 21 years old. don't worry, your dream will be passed onto generations. however, i am filled with a sort of rage. i want to end religion and i want to do it FAST. i lost a love to religion and that motivated me to see that that doesn;t happen for others in the future. unnecessary pain. much pain could be reduced in our lives if we made things EASIER on ourselves! so are you a deep ecologist? have you thought about raw foods? that involves less cooking, thus less energy wasted. also, GRAINS. GRAINS allowed there to be a population explosion. how do we phase out the one-billion poor in the world with inferior genes? how do we allow for natural selection to take place? having two kids is a great goal, but in order to "combat" the fucking religious and the stupid people in africa having 7 children as an AVERAGE there needs to be quite a few childless and single-child couples, too. i am for reducing the population, not just stabilizing it. 5 billion? some have even said 2 billion but that will be tough. we will have to contend with religious fanatics in the middle east. i think that is the dangerous part of the world. how do we overturn religion? seriously, look how much CONTROL/POWER the vatican has. i know this may seem like i didn;t read your site thorougly, but what can i do to change things? how do i educate others like you do? can i only recommend your site? i know i should be doing this for free, but are there any types of JOBS so that i can support myself? my parrents want me OUT and this is a dilemma for me. i don;t want a stupid service job or something unethical for me, something which upsets the balance of the earth. i just want to plant trees and educate others how to reduce pollution, children, etc. there are many things that my fellow americans won;t give up. i think alcohol is a problem in this country and it ruins families. coluntary sterilization? more euthenasia? what do we do? ok, that';s about all, but the job is a big thing! :) i need money so i can buy some acreage and grow my own food and use solar energy and live in a dome house. clothing! look at clothing. it's about marketing and shame. people are ashamed of their bodies. i believe nudity should be accepted. there is nothing wrong with our bodies. oh, one last thing before i go, CIRCUMCISION! talk about control! that has definitely got to stop. our penises evolved a certain way for a reason, and we are deprived of pleasure. in europe they don't, do they? just jews and americans? thanks a lot, get back to me even if you are busy, don't underestimate my ability to change and influence others to change.

What a posting. This needed a bit of thought and time to reply. Little tip; paragraphs and regular sentence structure are not bourgeois straight-jackets, they actually aid communication, which is good. No offence intended.

Losing a love to religion? I don't like the sound of that. Be careful you don't do something you regret out of hormone-driven angst. Atheism is a logical way of life, it is best adopted for the right reasons;and the right reasons are right and reason.

Raw foods.

I suppose you are right that cooking wastes energy but I happen to prefer a pepperoni pizza to a handful of wheat, tomatoes and a chunk of fatty pork. And where do you stop once you go down that road?

One billion people with poor genes. How do you make that out? What is the criteria? If you are saying that people are poor because of their genes I must disagree. I suppose there must be a large number of people with hereditary disease and conditions that make them a burden on the rest of us to a degree but you must clearly define the problem before you go proposing any solutions. I agree that there a large number of people in the world who add nothing and cost us all dear. Criminals. Thieves cost the world billions every month in lost property and wasted time and resources spent in combating and avoiding crime. Every day I waste time at work locking and unlocking a door that "protects" goods against pilfering and I spend time checking alarm systems at home and at work.

There are also people who could never contribute anything to society; today I heard of a case of a adult with the mental age of a four month old baby, he drowned, the council were negligent, so must be sued, for what loss??? Hitler never ordered any mental defectives killed. A father of a mental incompetent asked for his permission to let his son die a dignified death, as any dog or horse would be allowed. Hitler agreed. Hitler's henchmen took this as a sign of his will. Hitler had ordered the Jews exterminated, the mentally incompetent were added to the list. Do you know of an organisation called the Hindenburg Society or something similar? It promotes the use of Hydrogen as a clean fuel. It chose to confront the bogeyman of the Hindenburg airship head-on, the issue must be confronted. I have idly speculated about founding a Hitler Society, to promote scientific and reasoned approach to eugenics.

Eugenics

Eugenics is inevitable. The practice of selective breeding or selective non-breeding will happen. I think it should, in an entirely non-racist and non-nationalist way. I would ideally like to see an end to normal human breeding of the indiscriminate type. My father has had major heart surgery, he is a very fit man who never smoked and lead a very healthy lifestyle (unlike me). He now has seven grandchildren. Any or all of these grandchildren could have inherited his condition. How much better would it be if instead of having our children, blindly tossing the coin of genetics, we could have the children of our great-grandparents, selected proven genes that have shown themselves good for a whole lifetime, not just up until sexual maturity. Store the genes, or sperms and eggs, of people when they are young and then use them after the genes have proved that they produce healthy people capable of happiness and making a net contribution to society. It would also allow us to chose genes that work well together and then just swap one bad gene for another from the available ancestors. It will require genetic knowledge far in excess of what we have today, but we will have it one day, I say let us build the political will to use it.

I don't want my father's heart. But I am glad I have his face and his stature. In the future that choice will be viable.

Job advice. I am as qualified to advise on careers as Attila the Hun was to talk about getting on well with your neighbours. But you don't need money to change the world in the way I am doing. Winning over hearts and minds in ones and twos. You just need a website. That doesn't need a big budget. Any work could provide enough to finance it. I should know, I'm on very little. My basic wage is national minimum wage. Plus overtime and a bit of commission.

Allowing for natural selection to take place I think you share a very common misunderstanding. Natural selection is not a good thing. It does not have a purpose. Most things don't. Only man-made things have purposes. Life has no purpose. Evolution has no purpose any more than erosion, oxidation or precipitation does. There is no goal for evolution. We are not the pinnacle of evolution, nothing ever tried to evolve into us. We have no duty to evolve into something better. But it might be fun...

Population stability Reducing the population rapidly will result in a top-heavy distribution of ages. When we are old and decrepit there will not be enough young fit people around to change our sheets when shit the bed. The best way to reduce the population is gradually. A limit of 2 children per person will reduce the population because not every straight person has children and most gays don't either. That maximum of two will lead to an average of less than two, not everyone will want to repeat the horror and some will split up before they have a second. An average of, say, 1.8 per person will produce a slowing of growth, then stability, followed by sedate decline.

Ethical jobs Clubbing seals is more ethical than sponging off parents. I sell electrical goods, usurious credit to afford them and over-priced extended warranties to keep them running. Ideally I would write websites for selling compost to collective farms but in the real world we have to make compromises. I don't lie to any customers, ever, but I have to take their money. If anybody asks me straight out whether I would buy such a product or service I will answer them. Fortunately they don't. I can maintain a holier than thou attitude and still make ends meet, but they don't overlap much.

Circumcision Ridiculous initiation rite. Medically justified in a tiny handful of cases. I am "intact", I only saw one circumcised cock when I was a schoolboy. It is rare in England. A foreskin makes wanking so much easier.

Nudity Clothing is not just about modesty and oppression. As an Englishman I can assure you of this. Clothing is about practicality. I am not a pretty sight in the nude. I only feel the desire to strip off totally for about fifty hours per year. It's alright for you Californians.

Dome house Don't. Everybody needs a corner to sulk in. I think that just about covers all the points!

haha, ok, the dome house, now that's funny. check it out, though, it is more energy efficient. it uses sunroofs. the nudity thing. well see, you may not think you are a pretty site in the nude, but who cares? it is you and you should not have to be ashamed. all because of your country's model Twiggy do we have an obsession with being thin. the food thing. think about it. dairy and grain are extremely recent in our human history. we have not evolved to those foods. didn't you say yourself? when we developed grains it allowed more people to live, but LESS well. dairy? well English have about an 80% lactose-tolerant society, and i mean English blood, not nationality, but the majority of the world does not have lactase, the necessary enzyme. grains are too low in protein, dairy has a poor Magnesium:Calcium ratio. i did not become atheist out of anything to do with love. I SImply went through the motions of catholicism in my life, and i never challenged it because it was never that important--just routine. i went to catholic school 16 years! forget that! Are you kidding me about the genes? Go to Mexico and look at the people living in a garbage dump. Those are people with defective genes. I don't have any way to support that, but the poor tend to breed poor people. There are only environment and genetics to blame. Environment can't be 100% of the problem, though. And since when do we need people taking care of us when we are old? Not everyone dies in a rest home. If we can't take care of ourselves, we have children. We don't need more as a society. Let society take care of themselves, do it on an individual basis. Back to the food thing, what is it we FEED to those starving people? GRAIN! If we fed them hemp seeds, thjey would be much better off. Give them some wild fruit and seeds. Grain takes machinery to process. 70% of US grain goes to livestock. The only reason we eat dairy is because our nation was settled by Europeans. Too bad we have Asians, Indians, Mexicans, and blacks here, i guess they forgot that they shouldn;t be eating all that. Anyway, can you talk online? Do you have AOL instant messenger? thanks for your reply.

thank you. see, this goes to show you...xians won;t do this, they will refer you to the bible. i have put your website in my AOL profile so others may benefit. so many people say, ooh! you can;t trust the internet! whoever questioned the BIBLE and asked, hey where did this come from? anyway. i wish we could talk real time, so there'd be a fast exchange of ideas. see you later.

I don't do real time. I think slowly, carefully, offline. That is why E mail is so good for me. There is no point in me improving my typing speed, I type the speed I think, about twenty words per minute flat out. If I go faster I come over as stupid.

will you please add the paleolithic diet as one of your proposed changes? i think you could synthesize it to your thesis. i think the world would be better off in my system than in yours, but only because of a FEW more extreme ideals that i have. you may not agree, but that doesn't change their validity. like YOU sy, you may not like what you hear, but it still exists that way. ok? technology is polluting this earth, our agricultre is, too. that was the first invention, really. thanks me again

If you want to promote the Palaeolithic diet then why not write your own website? It is not very hard to learn the basics.

Personally I don't think that a major change in diet is really practical or desirable. It is certainly not possible for us to reverse the agricultural revolution and start being hunter-gatherers again.

Perhaps there is room for a male view of diet, far too many dieticians are anti-science inspired women with their own warped agendas. The subject needs more discussion and it needs more real scientists and particularly more men. Most wholefood health food stuff is expensive unpaletable and less good for us than a good rounded diet containing red meat, bread and familiar and tasty vegetables. Food should be affordable, nourishing and enjoyable, feminist-food is none of these. Wholemeal quiche has more fat than steak and white bread and lowers the body's zinc levels. Popeye ate spinach because somebody at the FDA didn't know how to do sums and so claimed that spinach has 100 times more iron than it really does. I bet it was a woman. Don't eat anything a woman cooks for you unless she's called Wendy™.

What made me come out with that stuff? Must have been something I ate. Ignore it, except the website stuff, if you have something to say then say it.

well i think we can reverse the trend, and that would mean organic produce. we should eat more RAW/FRESH fruits and vegetables and nuts and seeds and some animal protein sources, that's it, really. no processing, absolutely none. but you would have to grow your own! take responsibility, you know? no one should have to provide food for you, that is kind of your human membership fee. if you can't buy food, then suffer the consequences. if your parents brought you into this world with no food, then kill that parent so you now have room? hehe, let me know. but grains, dairy, and beans contribute to making the world weak and poor. let me know what you think.

you refer to satanists as "losers" who should be pitied. that sounds very christian and just plain ignorant to me. this is a personal belief of your own and not that of other atheists. i do not view satanists any different than i do christians, muslims, jews, etc. neither should any other rational free thinker. i am an atheist and would not ever consider ridiculing someone else for their beliefs. this is the same type of persecution that free thinkers have experienced over history. the loser comment is not only extremely hypocritical but is also based on NO facts. remember, the first step to ignorance begins with ignorance.

listen, do yourself and every other rational atheist a favor and get rid of your promotional idealist atheist site off the web, or at least fill it with facts not biased "unatheist" opinions. i am not defending marilyn manson, but to fill your pages with ridiculous fiction is just sad and proves to me that ignorance abounds in all beliefs, even atheism. your comments about marilyn manson sound right out of the pope's mouth. first off, manson has never said that he is a satanist. he is an open atheist. where did you get your ideas that all satanists listen to manson? mtv? the radio? your head? second, manson is a rock'n'roll band! people seem to forget this point. it is an insult to any human with reasonable intelligence, to explain how a certain rock band isn't really a bunch of satanists, but are in fact a bunch of rich rockstars who make money off their image! no shit!! and here i though manson was indeed the antichrist!!!! (sarcasm) Wake up willet, your no different than the bullshit spewing minister who has heard his own lies year after year that he eventually believes them. nobody visiting your site wants to hear a preacher. so step down from your podium , do some research, and when you figure out what it truely means to be a free thinker, then maybe someone will care what you have to say. until then, keep living in your own reality where all the answers come oh so easily to you.

Well thank you for reading *some* of my site. Point one: who said I was a FREETHINKER™?

I do not subscribe to the freethinkers club. I do not regard freethinking as being some kind of ultimate virtue. I value truth first.

I acknowledge on my site in several places that I do not know the whole truth. The particular page that so upsets you also starts with a clear warning that I have NOT done my homework. I am not an academic, there is no bibliography at the bottom of the page, check it again "Here is a little guide, it has very little substance, it is just my personal perspective. I have not included a bibliography or loads of references for one simple reason, this is all written off the top of my head." I don't know how much clearer you would want that to be. I have clearly stated that the page contains my ideas about these various types of atheists. Personal perspective. To have made it authoritative and fair to everybody would then have been a LIE. These are my views, for what, if anything, they are worth.

First you criticize me for doing what I explicitly said I would do, that is, air my own perspective, no warranty express or implied, then you accuse me of being patronizing to my audience. Marilyn Manson is an act. That was exactly my point. He is not a man with a religious belief that needs to be respected. He is a gobshite. A self-parody and laughing (at his fans) all the way to the bank.

I am not a free-thinker. I am not some holier than thou fair to everybody type. I have views, opinions, attitudes and I want to express them. On the Internet I can. Just like any fundamentalist of any flavour. Being an atheist has no rules. And if it did I would probably want to break some anyway. That's just the way I am. My site is about my thoughts and beliefs, can you see any logos from organizations I represent? My site contains my views. Perhaps that makes me a freethinker after all. Who gives a shit. I don't want a label, I want a website.

Thanks for the visit. Do come again.

Martin

I am still trying to work this one out.

You are a freethinking atheist and you want to shout me down and tell me to shut up? Why? Because you disagree with one of my opinions?

You tell me to do some research. It seems to me that you didn't even read the single page you were ranting on about. If you had you would see that I gave it as nothing but my opinion. As this was and remains my opinion where is the hypocrisy? It was never intended to be an authoritative guide. The web is full of them. There are hundreds of kids who write atheist WebPages because they had a row with mom and decide that being an atheist is the best way to piss her off, most of them put in a link to some academic or worthy site about atheism that gives balanced views on the subject.

What is an unatheist opinion? One that assumes the existence of some form of god. I don't. Atheism has no rules. Atheism is only definable by its opposite. If there were no theists there would be no atheists; think about it.

I don't subscribe to anybody's rules about what is correct thinking. I am not PC or AC either. Atheistically correct??? As far as the intellectual status of Marilyn Manson goes, this is worse than arguing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. The guy is a Mansonist. He worships his notoriety and his bank balance. I don't care what he calls himself.

Where did you get your idea that I thought all satanists listened to Manson? Did I put anything like that in the page you read? I have read it many more times than you have, there is no such suggestion in my writing. I have never studied Satanism for the same reason I have never studied Astrology, I can see that it has nothing in common with my beliefs and that I could not possibly come to a better synthesis of thought by studying it. Sometimes things are just plain wrong, no grain of truth to redeem them.

I admit that if I studied Satanism I would probably gain something by it, but I would waste too much of my life in the process. This is exactly the same as saying that if I read every copy of Superman comic I would probably gain something by it. But it would probably do me more harm than good, at the very least it would waste time that I could use reading something else. You cannot synthesize a better understanding of the Universe by trying to reconcile bullshit with science.

The optimum level of bullshit in my brain is the same as the optimum amount of bovine excrement in McDonald's hamburgers, as low as humanly possible to achieve. Unless there is some totally unexpected breakthrough in science that allows man to live to 200 and enjoy health and freetime a-plenty I will not research into Satanism. I have only another couple of decades of high quality intellectual life in front of me and there is simply too much interesting stuff piling up in my mental "must read" in-tray. I do not have a closed mind, I have a finite mind. I cannot study everything before being allowed to give my views. If I took everybody's advice about what was essential reading before I started to write I would not have enough time to sleep, let alone write. Chill out and read the rest of my site,

Martin

Don't call me willett, I am not at school now.

you'd be surprised by what you could learn reading superman comics.

Surprised maybe, but probably not educated much. Anyway, I have read some.

My point was that not all learning is equal. Two hours reading Richard Dawkins changed my life. The same time reading trashy fiction would not. Nothing against Superman as such.

Near death experiences. We are having them now. Death, in my definition, is the IRREVERISBLE end of life.

You cannot be a little bit dead or even near death. Just less healthy, in more need of medical care, in a lower state of consciousness. You cannot get a better understanding of life by looking at where it very nearly isn't. Lower states of consciousness are not better or purer. You are not dead just because your heart has stopped beating. You are nearer to the fundamental reality of life when you have heightened perception, not lessened. I wouldn't expect to be able to do calculations better when my brain is nearly starved of oxygen, why should I expect myself to do better philosophy?

I thought here was such an obvious fruit cake that I decided to have a bit of fun at his expense. I almost feel guilty for doing it, almost :-) Why do fruitcakes of whatever persuasion never use a Spellchecker?

It's interesting that you should ask whether we are God's pets, experiments etc, because in a sense we are. All Things are all part of what is known as the Grand Experiment. But the kind of existence which we mere humans are now enduring is far from whole. Once you get even an inkling as to what wholesome existence feels like, you would much rather exist than not. Just because life can be hard at times, is not to say it will always be hard. Hardships create contrast, and valuable learning.

And by the way, I happen to believe very strongly in evolution, both physical and non-physical. Evolution is a very clever mechanism which allows all sorts of physical life to form for all sorts of reasons. But I am not at all convinced by your little "thought experiment". Why not? Well, let's just say that I now have reached a stage in life where "proof" and "hard evidence" is unnecessary to me. They play no part, and I have reached that stage where my perception extends beyond the very-confined five senses.

But for those who like to have proof that they themselves are here, and are not merely someone's cosmic dream, will have to go without. The only way to prove this is to perform the experiment repeatedly of killing themselves and coming back to earth immediately after. After all, scientific truth is supposed to be proven via repeatable experiments isn't it?

Thanks for the comments. I don't understand what you are going on about but you seem to be happy so who am I to burst your bubble? As for the experiment of killing yourself I think this is a bit extreme, born of a too-literal reading of the idea of scientific methods. Sometimes a thought experiment can yield far more than a laboratory. I hope this message reaches whichever exalted level you dwell on.