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Atheism


While you could cite the extremes like Jim Jones, the reality is that most Christians are forced to nod and agree with political agendas that at their heart conflict with what they believe in the privacy of their own prayers. Such is the price of belonging to an orthodox faith that strives to control the political process.

Atheism is not anti-theism. It is simply the lack of a god in the political and social norms. It is exactly this freedom, entrenched by great men like Thomas Jefferson, that allows people of many faiths (or non-faiths) to coexist. If the control of the body politic is not a fight for the souls and morality of the masses, then the all people can live under it's banner. THIS is what has allowed North America to flourish, not an adherence to Christian doctrine.

You ask what it is that Atheism offers the world. This is it. So long as any one religions believes itself dominant over another, or more "right" than another, the freedom of the people to decide for themselves what they believe will always suffer. Only by allowing an atheist, non-religious code of ethics to govern can you meet the needs of all society, not just the religious elite.

It's about liberty and freedom; the right of every person under the law to believe or disbelieve any aspect of any religion's canon. No religious political structure can or would allow this. Only in an atheist system that allows all beliefs to exist can people live in a semblance harmony.]]> http://heathensguide.com/pblog/index.php?entry=entry071101-112339 William Hopper Thu, 01 Nov 2007 18:23:39 GMT http://heathensguide.com/pblog/index.php?entry=entry070904-232738
Religious folks tend to frame the question of abortion around the idea of God’s Will and the slaughter of the innocents. Pro-Choice folks tend to center the issue around a woman’s right to choose what to do with her own body. However, as I seem to lack both a god and woman’s body, I’m kinda stuck trying to figure it out based on the world I actually live in. You might assume that as a godless heathen I would side with those killing innocents, but (aside from the annoying brat that sat next to me at Denny’s last week) I do not condone killing children.

Ah, but then there’s that next big question… when is it a child? For the religious this is a deep and mysterious truth… life begins at conception. For the pro-choice, the answer is (usually) life begins at birth. From a heathen’s point of view I disagree with both. Follow me here… it has to do with a bus.

Pretend I was walking down the street and a bus came out of nowhere and splattered me across the pavement. An ambulance shows up and carts me off to the hospital where underpaid and overworked doctors stitch me up and put me on a variety of beeping and blinking machines. Eventually, a decision has to be made about life support.

In every province and state in every Western nation the decision on when to pull the plug on me is made based on brainwave activity. If I am brain dead [I mean for real] then I am dead. Pull the plug, call the coroner... I’m cold meat. Good Christians and heathens alike across the country agree that when there is absolutely zero brain wave activity then the person is kaput.

When it comes to abortion I basically go with this accepted medical definition of life: brainwave activity. If the woman is in the early part of her first trimester before the brain develops in the embryo, then by all medical standards you are not dealing with a human life. It may be POTENTIAL human life, but it is not in fact a living “being” by the definition used by palliative care physicians and Christian grief councilors.

Once you do have brainwave activity then it becomes an issue of two persons, the mother and the child. That gets all messy and concerned and frankly I am glad to let the courts and councilors debate the value of mother versus child’s wellbeing. But until that point, when there is no brain wave activity, there is no human life. So say the doctors.

You can fight about late-term abortions and rights, but for the definition of "what is life", I think the precedent is already well established. According to accepted medical practice a life exists where you can show brain wave activity. If there are no brainwaves, there is no human life.




Click here to get your copy of The Heathen's Guide to World Religions by William Hopper.]]> http://heathensguide.com/pblog/index.php?entry=entry070904-232738 William Hopper Wed, 05 Sep 2007 06:27:38 GMT http://heathensguide.com/pblog/index.php?entry=entry070903-004158 I am told that I need to do more shameless promo amid my ramblings, so here ya go: Promo for my books...






Click here to get your copy of The Heathen's Guide to World Religions by William Hopper.]]> http://heathensguide.com/pblog/index.php?entry=entry070903-004158 William Hopper Mon, 03 Sep 2007 07:41:58 GMT http://heathensguide.com/pblog/index.php?entry=entry070810-194924 There are truths in the world... real and vital things that we have to abide by to make things work. The things that stop us all from killing each other.

If you stop and educate people on cause and effect they will in time come to understand the societal reasons for not acting on base impulses. The problem is (and has always been) that most people don't care enough to learn and the vast majority of people are too busy trying to stay alive to bother with ethereal concepts.

Religions have been the tool that's been used to instill the basic social codes in people without having to explain why or how they work. Instead, they create a "GOD" that oversees every action and keeps people in line. People seem to need either fear or understanding in order to work towards the common good instead of the personal, selfish good. Education breeds understanding, religion breeds fear. Either way the end result is the same... no one is going to mug you in a back alley.

What is dangerous about this era we are in (I think) is that we are crossing a chasm where we have lost the fear of religions but have not cultivated enough understanding and empathy in the masses to make up for it. The "common good" is a saying we just never hear anymore unless it's spoken by a politician looking for more money or power.

Just thinking as I type...]]> http://heathensguide.com/pblog/index.php?entry=entry070810-194924 William Hopper Sat, 11 Aug 2007 02:49:24 GMT http://heathensguide.com/pblog/index.php?entry=entry070723-191455
]]> http://heathensguide.com/pblog/index.php?entry=entry070723-191455 William Hopper Tue, 24 Jul 2007 02:14:55 GMT http://heathensguide.com/pblog/index.php?entry=entry070528-203625

After ten years of working on The Heathen’s Guide series, I’m used to getting odd e-mail. I’ve been asked if I know Satan personally (No, and I wish he’d quit telling people we were friends). I’ve been offered a tv show (not a chance). I’ve even been offered Holy Orders. (No, no, and no.) I never get bothered by it all… it’s just part of this thing I call a life.

Lately, though, I have been getting annoyed. Not by the e-mailers… still cool to get the bizarre diatribes. It’s the topic of the emails that is starting to get to me… namely, “Beam Me Up, Jesus: A Heathen's Guide to the Rapture.”

For the record: I have nothing to do with this book, and it is not the next book in the Heathen’s Guide series. The next book is The Heathen’s Guide to Xmas, which is sitting here waiting for another edit before going to press. It should be out for December… coincidentally enough.

Beam Me Up, Jesus: A Heathen's Guide to the Rapture is written by someone who either had no idea my series of books existed, or someone who blatantly stole the title and idea of the series and figured I’d never sue. (Lawyers like me.)

Regardless, I’m getting a lot of flack on this one in emails. The best response yet came from a guy in England who got very irate with me when I told him that this was not my next book. He replied simply “WHY THE HELL NOT???”

I gotta agree with him. I had planned on doing the Heathen’s Guide to the Apocalypse, which is basically the same book as was written by Mr. Gerard. (I described the outline for this book at the end of one of the Heathen’s editions).

Anyway, it’s all very odd and I’m gonna let the lawyers deal with it. But for now I figure I’d better give a heads up in the blog about this so folks understand that I have not assumed a pen name or sold the rights to the Heathen’s Guide series.

I have no doubt there will be more to this story in the future…


]]> http://heathensguide.com/pblog/index.php?entry=entry070528-203625 William Hopper Tue, 29 May 2007 03:36:25 GMT http://heathensguide.com/pblog/index.php?entry=entry070520-170755
We see our solar system and believe it's orderly, with 9 planets perfectly circling our sun in balanced orbits. We choose to ignore that there is a huge asteroid belt out past Neptune that is the debris of planets from our system that crashed into each other.

Equations in higher math always seem to take on a life of their own. Once you get past the "2 plus two equals 4" stage of math (which is, in fact, wrong in higher math as no 2 units can truly be equal to any two other units) it all gets muddled. Mathematicians derive order from these sequences by stopping, taking the part they understand, and defining it. More often than not, however, even these definitions are changed in a generation or so when some other mathematician picks up the equation and takes it another step further.
]]> http://heathensguide.com/pblog/index.php?entry=entry070520-170755 William Hopper Mon, 21 May 2007 00:07:55 GMT http://heathensguide.com/pblog/index.php?entry=entry070520-170634
According to Christianity God knew all this BEFORE creation. If this is true then he deliberately and with forethought created beings specifically to toss them into hell. In the meantime he created a situation where those created, good or bad, saved or not, live on a cursed planet.

He could have creaated the exact humans he wanted without the test of trees, and without the charactor flaw that supposedly damned all of us to this cursed planet hoping He will be generous enough to give us a way out through grace.

Given the power of an almighty God, the fall in Eden did not need to happen. He set it up.

]]> http://heathensguide.com/pblog/index.php?entry=entry070520-170634 William Hopper Mon, 21 May 2007 00:06:34 GMT http://heathensguide.com/pblog/index.php?entry=entry070520-170512
However, when I look around I see that most humans use these traits to get by, pay rent, and watch TV. For every Einstein there are millions upon millions who live their lives in mediocrity and die uneventful deaths. Their "intelligence" over, say, a horse does them little good in life. However, a horse lives a much freer life without the tumultuous highs and lows of humans. Whose way is better?

As for extrapolating that because we are intelligent there must be a higher intelligence than our own: That's akin to saying that since fish swim well, we can extrapolate that there must be something somewhere that swims better than a fish. B does not follow from A on that account for me.

Now.. as for good and evil. Again, a notion I have spent much time on in my pursuits.

My big revelation about good and evil was the nature of each. I realized that that which is good (alms, caring, love, etc.) are all things that put the good of others before your own needs and wants.

Inversely, that which is evil (rape, theft, murder, torture) are all things that put your own needs ahead of the needs of others.

Biblically, good and evil, then, can be roughly defined as the difference between giving and taking.

I then read Ayn Rand's "The Virtue of Selfishness". It tosses a wrench in the classic Christian definition of good and evil. (Except for the Methodist views, which correspond nicely with Rand.)

So, where does all this leave me in the good and evil debate? So far, I figure that most of what all religions are trying to do is to govern society in a way that allows people to live with each other without killing each other. The "good" laws are set up to prevent people from doing things that cause social havoc. Christians will say the wisdom in this comes from a god who instructed these laws through the bible. But looking at all religions and the similar laws passed in each culture I think the "don't kill, rape, or steal" laws have evolved out of need, not divine guidance. (Note that many scholars credit Hammurabi’s Code for much of the Mosaic laws in the Pentateuch.)

As for being informed by your faith that there is a just and loving god out there somewhere, I can only envy that. I do not see a world that I could credit a just god with creating. Even if you feel that it was man's mistake that created all this misery, it would have been the act of your just and loving god to decide that we all need to suffer, scrape, and die. From where I sit I see no justice in this, and certainly no love.]]> http://heathensguide.com/pblog/index.php?entry=entry070520-170512 William Hopper Mon, 21 May 2007 00:05:12 GMT http://heathensguide.com/pblog/index.php?entry=entry070520-170405
The bible is to history what Miami Vice is to police work. It covers very small, very selective parts of history and mixes them in with a lot of morality tales (Jonah, Job, etc.) that have nothing to do with the history of the human race. Notabley, the bible omits the histories of most of the people on this planet, selecting only the history of the Jews and early Christians. The Phonecians, Romans, Gauls, and Greeks are only footnotes. The Mongols, Celts, Native Americans, and Aztecs are entirely missing from this "history book".

As for John being the oldest gospel, I believe that honor belongs to the Q Gospel, which is of course missing from the bible.

As for "planting seeds of doubt" I would say that those who espouse the bible as a testament of truth have a huge onus of proof to defend given the extreme claims that come with the book. As thsi is the basis for many legal and political decisions that Christian and heathen alike have to live by, I think sceptisism and doubt need to be the cornerstone of any inquiry into the bible as authoritive text. Simply saying it's authoritive does not make it so, any more than saying Dianetics or the Book of Mormon are authoritive because people believe their god has instructed them through it.

]]> http://heathensguide.com/pblog/index.php?entry=entry070520-170405 William Hopper Mon, 21 May 2007 00:04:05 GMT