Thought

What are humans but a group of cells blessed and cursed with consciousness, condemned to live a short life on this small planet in a corner of the universe, limited in the spectrum of what they can sense without aid? I find it surprising that with all these constrictions humans seek to limit themselves even more. Imposing meaningless restrictions based on gender, race, beliefs, traditions, or other petty differences. I wonder what it would take to make them see....

Thought

It is in the hours of our most dire needs that we are tempted to activate the most delusional and illogical parts of our brains. Ergo, it is in these times that we should be using logic the most....

Commandments

The commandments written by an omnipotent, omniscient "god":

- I am your Lord and God.
- You shall have no other gods before Me.
- You shall not make for yourself an idol.
- You shall not make wrongful use of the name of your God.
- Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.
- Honor your parents.
- You shall not murder.
- You shall not commit adultery.
- You shall not steal.
- You shall not bear false witness.
- You shall not covet your neighbor's wife.
- You shall not covet your neighbor's house.

Source

The commandments written by an atheist:

- Do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you.
- In all things, strive to cause no harm.
- Treat your fellow human beings, your fellow living things, and the world in general with love, honesty, faithfulness and respect.
- Do not overlook evil or shrink from administering justice, but always be ready to forgive wrongdoing freely admitted and honestly regretted.
- Live life with a sense of joy and wonder.
- Always seek to be learning something new.
- Test all things; always check your ideas against the facts, and be ready to discard even a cherished belief if it does not conform to them.
- Never seek to censor or cut yourself off from dissent; always respect the right of others to disagree with you.
- Form independent opinions on the basis of your own reason and experience; do not allow yourself to be led blindly by others.
- Question everything.

Source

Some additions by another atheist:

- Enjoy your own sex life (so long as it damages nobody else) and leave others to enjoy theirs in private whatever their inclinations, which are none of your business.
- Do not discriminate or oppress on the basis of sex, race or (as far as possible) species.
- Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.
- Value the future on a timescale longer than your own.

Source: Dawkins, R. (2006). The God Delusion

As much as I feel compelled to compare, I think the mere act of putting them side by side does the job....

The Power Problem

Why is it considered wrong for most countries to have nuclear weapons? The simple answer is that nuclear weapons are too big a power for these countries to handle....

I was thinking of the power given to parents in raising their children. This power should not be underestimated. By giving two people almost complete control over the life of a child (or any number of children they deem appropriate), parents are, to a great extent, given control over the way the next generation thinks and acts. This would not be a problem if we assume that parents teach children human values and morals, the basics of how to tell right from wrong, logic and reasoning, and then allow them to explore the richness of the world around them with a free mind. However, if we go to the other extreme, we find that parents may transfer their full set of memes to their children without any sort of filtering, adjustment, or adaptation. With religious fundamentalists or extremists as well as some other cases, children are brought up in an environment that can cripple their thinking process or social activity irreversibly.

"Michael Shermer, in How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science, describes a large survey of randomly chosen Americans that he and his colleague Frank Sulloway carried out. Among their many interesting results was the discovery that religiosity is indeed negatively correlated with education (more highly educated people are less likely to be religious). Religiosity is also negatively correlated with interest in science and (strongly) with political liberalism. None of this is surprising, nor is the fact that there is a positive correlation between religiosity and parents' religiosity. Sociologists studying British children have found that only about one in twelve break away from their parents' religious beliefs."

Richard Dawkins
The God Delusion

After reading the above statistics, especially the last part, one can't help but wonder: How free are we?

In my attempt to find possible solutions for this problem, I was reminded of a post by Devil's Mind about emotional rape that I thought was relevant to the subject. As with every problem, the first step to solving it is realizing that there's a problem to begin with. Psychological damage cannot be assessed as easily as physical damage, it becomes increasingly more difficult to undo as time goes by, and worst of all, the victim is generally unaware of the damage in the cases of imposing social or religious values.

There are probably hundreds of thousands of parents who realize that the world moves forward very quickly and that to bring their children up properly they need to expect change and accept it, be open-minded, and flexible. These present a partial solution to the problem. But what about the tens of millions of parents who don't follow the same course, who think they own their children and have the right to impose whatever ideology they see fit on them?

Mojoey's Atheist Blogroll

I recently joined Mojoey's Atheist Blogroll. I found the collection of blogs in this blogroll to be quite intriguing. If you're interested and would like to join, you can find instructions and minimum requirements here.

Gods

Looking at this list, one can't help but feel the despair, and the yearning for a purpose, a higher power, and a reason for existence. A need, though self-generated, so blinding that humans throughout history enclose themselves in fake shells that with time become their whole reality (see Bubbles). The self-sustaining nature of religion that makes people see the lies others live yet consider themselves or their religion exempt amazes me.

Specialness

I was reading a post on The Dilbert Blog that made me think of how humans see themselves. Why do most people get offended when compared to animals? To me, the logical reason would be that comparing one to an animal insults that person's intelligence. But the fact remains that humans and animals are made of the same building blocks, both function in the same way, and both survived evolution. They can be looked at as two solutions to an equation, one being more complex than the other.

A dear friend once told me: "Most humans are similar in their uniqueness". I completely agree with that point. Almost every person would like to think of himself/herself as being special, unique, unpredictable, and simply different. The truth, sadly, is that this is wrong. I think our need to feel unique and special is, among other factors, what led to inventing the concepts of the spirit or the soul, intelligent design, god, religion, and many other concepts that if inspected by, for example, another species that's as intelligent as us but doesn't suffer the specialness complex would be understandably seen as nothing but delusions.

According to this article, falling in love activates the exact same system as taking cocaine. I will discuss this matter in further detail in a separate post, but isn't this enough proof of how unreliable our emotions are?

Addendum to "Families"

It has been brought to my attention by many who read my post on families that the post is unclear, quite aggressive, and could send out the wrong message to people. It is in light of these comments that I decided to write this extra explanation.

Most people who read the post (and don't know me personally) assumed I had a very bad family, and that I was writing out of a terrible personal experience. That is a totally wrong assumption. What I merely did was take a step back and look at the general picture. Just because a certain concept or a group of concepts doesn't apply to a minority doesn't mean that it's wrong. The problem is that people are usually tempted to look at the matter from a very personal perspective, while in fact it is anything but personal. Once you realize the fact that parents are humans and hence, are as imperfect, as susceptible to over-attachment, and as vulnerable to emotions as anyone else, you'll begin to see the perspective from which I am discussing the issue.

In the original post, I deliberately used exaggerated extremes in an attempt to give those who read it a full account of the extent to which our concepts about families can be wrong (Somewhat similar to when people say "Smoking kills"). It is then up to the reader to choose what matches the specific condition he/she is in, or that with which he/she comes in contact. In case that concept was not apparent or was understood in the wrong way, I hope this little elaboration clears it up....

Fools

Bubbles

One particularly interesting characteristic I found in humans is their need to understand their surroundings. We always try so desperately to find the general rule, to understand the reason and the purpose of things, and to understand other people. I believe this need is so urgent that each one of us is forced to create a bubble around him/herself. A bubble which, to that person, is the whole world and in which he/she understands everything. Naturally, as we grow and get exposed to a much higher diversity of people and ideas, our bubble grows with us, we understand more, whether through learning or experience.

Humans are, understandably, very protective of their bubbles. Once we believe in something, we don't tend to change it easily. However, what I can't understand is how can a person truly believe he/she has sufficient knowledge not to seek any more? How can one wrap him/herself with a bubble, seal it, and then judge people accordingly? Two of the biggest examples on this subject are: religious intolerance, and the generation gap. Needless to say, these two issues are the cause of many troubles that plague our world, and sadly, the ideology that leads to them is being passed on as valuable heritage from generation to the next, making it increasingly harder to break the circle....