Today I stumbled upon this blog with footage of a CNN feature about discrimination against American atheists. There is lots of interesting commentary from the blogger and from people who've posted to the story. It's particularly interesting to read that 'one nation under God' and 'in god we trust' were added to the American lexicon during the 1950s witch-hunt era.
I'm an atheist, and generally speaking I veer between being baffled by and dismayed at the behaviour of so-called 'believers' around the world. It's been said a billion times before, but what is done in the 'name of God' by so many self-interested people is disgraceful. I think Monty Python's Life of Brian did a good job of summing up how ridiculous the whole 'in the name of the Lord'-thing has become over the last 2000 years, especially in the scene where the two People's Popular Front/ Popular People's Front groups beat each other up in the sewers of Pontius Pilot's HQ. Er, unless I'm missing something, aren't the Jewish, Christian and Muslim Gods basically the same?
Freud's comments on theistic belief have been argued about for decades, but they still make for stark, thought-provoking reading. He said that religious belief is, '...so pathetically absurd and... infantile that it is humiliating and embarrassing to think that the majority of people will never rise above it.'
He went on to say that the concept of God as, '...resembling a man but magnified in every respect, an idealized superman, reflects the gross ignorance of primitive peoples.'
Suffice to say, that does it for me. No-one's pulling anyone's strings in this world - apart from a lot of power-hungry (mostly) men who we would all do better without.
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