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You first. I would be interested to know at what weight does a man's opinions cease to count. Can you enlighten me? How heavy do you have to be to have everything you do dismissed and rubbished simply by pointing out your weight? I can understand such an attitude in a military man, you have been taught to despise fatness in yourself and others as it makes you a less effective tool for your masters, but I am nobody's tool or weapon and I don't give a fuck about your conditioned-response attitude to my body. I would also be interested in knowing what other more effective methods of leveraging more than a one in 6.5 billion influence on the world exist for a man in full time employment with a family to keep on a small income other than doing what I am doing now, and how many of them you have followed.
A lack of discipline. A very telling phrase. As I pointed out your obsession with my weight is a conditioned response. You have been taught to regard being overweight as a lack of discipline and to regard a lack of discipline to be an unquestioned sin. Why? Because your body belongs to Uncle Sam, he's paid for it and he doesn't want you to fuck it up for him until after he's finished using it. Afterwards of course he doesn't give a flying fuck, you will not be getting any lifetime gym membership and personal trainer out of him. Uncle Sam cares for the man in uniform, not out, and only in the same way as it cares for his rifle. I have no doubt that you are fitter than me. Congratulations. You win. I have not over calculated my influence on the world. I know that I do not have the discipline to run a political campaign and I can't spare enough money to make much difference by direct charity and I certainly cannot afford to give up looking after my family's needs to go and do some charity work. What I can do is capture people's imagination and introduce them to new ideas, tens of thousands of people per month. Naturally there is no way that I can change all those thousands of people to believe all the same things as I believe, that would be unrealistic, but I can and do change attitudes and people. Sometimes only small changes, but every one helps. My main influence has been with atheistic rebels without a cause, I have shown them that they are not alone and I have been able to introduce them to much better arguments, this has given many people the tools they need to resist absorption into the Christian Borg or pissing their life away as mindless anarchic punks. There is a handful of people, say a platoon-size number, who have been significantly affected by me. I have influenced them more than any teacher, uncle, sergeant or youth worker has ever done. These people will remember me long after I have died, and yet they have never met me. They will carry my ideas, the new ones and those I have passed on, securely into the future, scattered across the face of the Earth. Beyond that group there are a few thousand people who I have influenced in lesser ways, introducing them to new ideas, new ways of thinking and a reassurance that they are not mad, that there are other people out there who think those ideas too. When I die something will live on beyond a memory of a character and a few exploits.
If you don't believe that I have influence on people then don't believe it. Your belief or lack of it will have no effect on the real world. You obviously do not want to believe me so I shall not waste much time with you. You don't agree with me, fine, I am not going to stop doing what I am doing, especially because you clearly want me to stop. I get dozens of messages of support and I can see my ideas, often my phrases, being passed around and passed on. Why are you bothering with me if I have so little effect on the world? Haven't you got any innocent civilians to terrorize?
How?
Being a better person makes you a better person. Believing in a sky pixie makes you superstitious, wrong and a potential threat to the rest of humanity. Of course it is perfectly possible to do the right thing for a stupid reason and to do amazing things because you erroneously believe you have supernatural help. The fact that people with a faith sometimes do good things does not prove that they are right to have that faith or that their faith is justified or that faith, or any faith, is a good thing. Atheists don't kill people for their beliefs. Communists might do but those people are communists first and therefore atheists not the other way around. I don't know any atheists who are communists. Belief in the End Times (hurry up Armageddon, get all the Jews into Israel and have a nuclear war so we can get Jesus here pronto) or the idea that martyrdom and 72 virgins in paradise awaits the hero who kills you when he kills himself - those are dangerous ideas. They are not ideas that make people better people. They make people more efficient vectors of the mind viruses they carry but they don't make people better people. Faith is extremely dangerous. It has killed more people than anything humanity has ever developed with the possible exception of sexual jealousy. Only a victim of it would regard it as a virtue. Victims tend to become abusers in their turn unless they are offered help. Of course we don't know. I know we don't know. It is the people who are convinced that they do know that are causing the problems. What are you doing to challenge them?
People do not set off on a thousand mile journey to lay waste to a city and murder its inhabitants out of ignorance. They did it because of faith. Belief without proof, belief in spite of evidence to the contrary. Faith is not a virtue, it is a weapon and I'd like to see the world disarmed. Being good isn't difficult. We all know how to do it. It does not require a belief in anything supernatural to treat other people in the way we would have them treat us. However religion changes that, now you can't be good unless your daughter is veiled, you slice up your children's genitals, you don't eat shrimp, you wear an image of a man being tortured to death around your neck, you can recite huge chunks from a book filled with hate and stories of genocide or you wipe your arse with the appropriate hand. That sort of stuff is not helpful. Why on Earth would you give people who spread such ridiculous ideas respect?
People deserve respect because they are people. They deserve more respect if they are good people. Nobody deserves more respect because they have a belief in something that cannot be proved and still less merely because they make the outward gestures associated with a person who believes unprovable things. Religion deserves no more respect than any other belief. No belief should give a person claiming such belief a greater status or more rights. I have a great respect for Martin Luther King Jnr. not because of the religion that he believed in but because of his courage and strength of character. No doubt if he could see me expressing admiration he would then claim it was not his strength but the Lord's strength, and at that point my respect would begin to evaporate. That kind of belief makes every failure personal and every success belongs to something that does not exist. Of course the Lord never fails, if you fail you did it alone, if you succeeded you better not claim that was your doing... That is one of the ways religion strangles people and takes them over. Every good thing is a God thing and every bad thing is yet more evidence of how bad people are and how important it is to spread the Word of God ever harder. Heads God is Great, tails man must praise God harder. Another paradox? Is your head throbbing? Praise God you have a head! Of course I could wind up dead for saying this stuff. The almighty God needs people who don't believe in him killed. He is far too busy causing cancers and earthquakes and making his holy name appear in tomatoes to do it himself so he recruits people to do it for him. People who don't respect people or their rights and freedoms but instead respect something that does not exist, that they respect more than their own life. If you believe that every human deserves respect how can you regard religion as a good thing? Religions teach people to hate, despise and kill people because of their beliefs in unprovable things. The world will never unite under a single religion. People will not stand for that. Churches schism. New prophets emerge. Some people need to have the impression that they are fighting to save the world from itself. These processes are not likely to change. The only way that there can be peace on Earth is by down-playing religion. Secularism with tolerance for religion is the only viable answer. Religious people treat secularism as an evil because it is a threat to them. But a good secular state does not prevent people having a religion or living according to values they claim come from their gods. The USA is a secular state and that doesn't stop it being full of religious believers. However secularism will always be under threat from the religious who will never give up the fight to take over the entire world and every aspect of human life. That is why simply tolerating the religious is not good enough, people have to be brought along to the idea of tolerating people and all expressions of beliefs and lack of beliefs. I see the future as a dynamic balance. That balance cannot be maintained when one side and supposed and claimed neutrals make out that it is perfectly justified for only the religious side of the pendulum to ever do any pushing and that any efforts to resist the push towards religious hegemony is inspired by evil, malice or the Devil. I often get a response of sheer bafflement "since when did atheists start looking for converts?" Why should anybody assume any matter of controversy is composed of one side which is apathetic and the other side which is passionately committed? There is no way that you can debate somebody out of a religious position. In most cases they didn't find their way in there through a rational process so they are unlikely to get out that way. All religions which have survived for more than a few decades have developed effective defence mechanisms. If you attack them those defence mechanisms come into play. I have never come across any stories of anybody being directly debated out of a religious belief. However, I do know that people have read my articles and allowed themselves to be swayed. It is not the person I am writing to who changes their mind, but people reading the arguments later, people who are not feeling under any pressure, people who allow themselves to be open to the ideas I present. I don't see the destruction of all religions as a goal that is worth pursuing. Attacking the religious physically and trying to suppress their activities is totally counter-productive. Trying to eliminate religion is as ill-advised as trying to eliminate inflation or unemployment, a much better strategy is to try to keep it within tolerable limits. Religion is not a good thing and the ideal level of religion in any society would be zero but there is no way to achieve that without creating more problems and making the world a less good place. I cannot foresee any time in which it would be possible to declare religion dead. Religions have been designed via a process of evolution to survive. Religious ideas will also arise spontaneously. This is nothing to do with our species, I believe these factors will apply to any society that has mortal intelligent highly communicative beings. Religion will never die. The trick is to ensure that it doesn't kills us.
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