by Scott Kaelen
Atheists don’t have a faith or a teaching, or a book of rules and commandments. What they have is an inquisitive and open mind that is willing to explore every corner of the universe and not be afraid of what they discover out there, even if it’s a superbly powerful entity that tries to bully us into worshipping it. The word ‘atheism’ merely confirms a lack of faith and belief in the improbable and unprovable.
This collection of essays shines the spotlights of science and psychology into the corner of religion, exposing the anachronistic belief systems for the shackles of oppression that they truly are.
Life, The Universe & Free Thinking is a journey that spans a far greater expanse of time and space than even the known universe. It offers truths and theories with the strength to negate any possibility of an all-powerful cosmic puppet-master. It utilises the words of the holy scriptures as tools to turn against themselves, because, as the great Isaac Asimov once said, “Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.”
These are essays for those who dare.
These are essays for you.
DISCLAIMER
In this work of non-fiction, the author has taken all care to maintain the accuracy of statistics, historical opinions, Bible content and current affairs as they stand at the time of publication, and to ensure that all information is accurate to the best of his knowledge, except where such information pertains to claims from fictitious works such as the Bible, the historicity of which is questionable at best.
The opinions of the author may in part be taken as advice, but should in no way be classed as professional advice. Finally, the author makes no apologies for any feelings that result in being hurt as a consequence of reading Life, The Universe & Free Thinking beyond the disclaimer.
COPYRIGHT
Life, The Universe & Free Thinking
copyright © 2016 Scott Kaelen
All poems by and copyright © 2015, 2016 Scott Kaelen
All content copyright © 2016 Scott Kaelen except Bible quotes
All rights reserved
CREDITS
All poems taken from the poetry volume DeadVerse except for the previously unpublished I, Architect and Did You See This Coming?
The character of Cosmos is taken from the comic fantasy short story When Gods Awaken by Scott Kaelen.
www.mybook.to/DV
www.mybook.to/WGA
DEDICATIONS
For the major influences in my life on the subjects covered in Life, The Universe & Free Thinking. These are: Isaac Asimov, Patrick Moore, David Attenborough, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Brian Cox.
SPECIAL THANKS
To fellow author, Electa Graham, for whom my well of gratitude runs deep, not only for being my canary (beta reader) but more so for being an altogether amazing person.
electagraham.com
LIFE,
THE UNIVERSE
&
FREE THINKING
Scott Kaelen
2016
CONTENTS
PART I – MODERN PERCEPTION
Mankind, In A Nutshell
Critical Thinking
Prerequisites For Critical Thought
The Atheism Onion
To Believe Or Not To Believe?
Faith Without Proof
The Importance Of Magic
A Move In The Right Direction
PART II – THE OLD TESTAMENT
The Proof Is In The Pudding
What Lot Said
To Onan Is Human
Moses & The Capricious God
Deuteronomy Commandments Explained
Deuteronomy Commandments Rewritten
Keep It In The Family
Lock Up Your Daughters
Like A Deity Scorned
PART III – BAD RELIGION
Christ’s Birth Exposed
No Other Gods Before Me
God On Suicide
Does God Defend Homosexuality?
Christianity & Homosexuality
Muhammad’s Curse
The Price
Did God Lose His Balls?
God Loves
PART IV – IT’S IN THE MIND
Love & God
The Replacement God-Ego
The Free Will Of Sentience
Psychological Projection
The Religious Disorder
Playroom
Blessed Are Who?
Digging For Christian Gold
When Tolerance Is As Bad As Intolerance
PART V – PREHISTORY
The Long-Lost Secrets Of Creation
Gods Of Extinction
Not Just A Pretty Bauble
Moon Dayist (Not Deist)
Preserved Remains Of ‘First Man’ Discovered
Evolution & Religion
I, Architect
PART VI – EXPANDING THE DIVIDE
A Tale Of Two Deities
The Relativity Of Being Lost
The Object & The Force
Faith Versus Logic
The Theist’s Fear Of Science
The Ridiculous Infinity Argument
Do Only Christians Get Into Heaven?
PART VII – INTO THE FUTURE
The Claustrophobic God
Beyond The Big Bang Theory
The Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall
The Cosmic Black Hole & The Omniverse
The Chronology Of Cosmic Understanding
World Population Rise
Leaving Earth
The Ultimate Futility Of Religion
Taking The Podium
Did You See This Coming?
LET
THERE
BE
LOGIC
MANKIND, IN A NUTSHELL
(AN INTRODUCTION)
One need not look too deeply into homo sapiens’ brief flash in the evolutionary pan to see that its natural order has veered off-kilter. When we apply this knowledge to a comparison with Earth’s pre-human history, it is obvious that we’ve become an unwelcome mutation in the balance of nature. For hundreds of millions of years, the swell of life upon Earth ebbed and flowed with a pattern recognisable as natural order; even homo sapiens remained governed by such order for two hundred thousand years.
And then two things simultaneously occurred: Man started to learn about the surrounding world, and he began making guesses about that world. Some of those assumptions would lead to empirical truths becoming common-known facts. But certain presumptions would be way off in their reasoning, and their cumulative continuance to be wrong would result in catastrophic events lasting thousands of years into humanity’s turbulent emergence as the dominant species.
Mankind’s folly would bring ruin to itself and to its host planet. Very few people cared enough, and of those that did care, even fewer were willing to actively attempt to reverse the damage.
By the beginning of the 22nd century the climate will have changed globally from how we know it today; summers will be warmer, winters no doubt colder. The human population will have increased to over 11 billion from the current 7.5 billion. Food will be in much higher demand, as will medications, fuels, electricity, clean water, and many other aspects of cultured existence. More people equals more demand, which will result in a greater amount of global damage. There will be many fewer people dying, and many more people being born, resulting in a higher percentage of dependants: children, disabled people, and tthe elderly and infirm. A higher percentage of dependants means a comparatively shallower pool of able-bodied, able-minded people who can be depended upon. Already in 2016 there are roughly 500,000 babi
es beingt born daily, but only around 200,000 people dying per day – and that isn’t just dying of old age, that’s the whole spectrum of deaths, natural or otherwise. Humanity is on a steady decline into a grim future indeed.
We are capable of great achievements, but also of great folly. We are the sum of our achievements, but we are also the sum of our errors. Often, though, the good and the bad are two edges of the same blade, and lessons not learned early enough will be learned too late, leaving our species-wide future snagged on the barbed thorns of its own self-induced fate.
Let’s examine those achievements and errors, and let’s start to learn those lessons before it really does become too late to administer to the damage already done. After all, if we, ourselves, don’t wipe the slate clean, nature will undoubtedly do it for us. Earth has already had its fair share of extinction events, and I don’t doubt there’ll be another.
We have three choices: continue as we are and either kill ourselves or wait until nature does it for us, or amend our ways and begin to think seriously about the future of our species. It’s time to begin.
CRITICAL THINKING
(A BRIEF EXERCISE)
As far as scientific hypotheses are concerned, I can’t conscionably buy the whole package deal regarding how our corner of existence came into being. For instance, I don’t prescribe to the idea that what today is a sphere of almost 100 billion light years across, surrounded by impenetrable darkness, was 14 billion years ago the size of a mere pinprick. My personal line of what is plausible is drawn somewhere before the “pre-Big Bang subatomic universe” hypothesis, unless or until it is expanded upon. Many of my fellow thinkers disagree with me, of course, especially physicists, who admittedly understand a lot more about the mechanisms of the universe than I do. I suspect the missing pieces of the pre-Big Bang puzzle lie somewhere beyond M theory and the hypothetical physics suggestion of “bubble universes”, because, before the lid blew on the pinprick universe pot, there can’t have merely been a subatomic universe as dense as the current Known Universe existing in a constant state of timelessness. That’s just too wishy-washy. But of course this is only a speculation I lean towards based on modern scientific and philosophical limitations.
Most scientists believe that everything we can see with the naked eye or detect with our instruments is the sum of (or a vast proportion of the total of) the entirety of existence. I don’t buy that, either. You see, even some of today’s prominent researchers and critical thinkers can’t get past the “fish in a bowl” problem. Any free thinker who takes every scientific suggestion as utterly true, despite the knowledge that science is always evolving and amending its database of knowledge, is merely going along with the “follow what’s popular” idea, without questioning it.
Yes, the universe has expanded exponentially since its beginnings. Yes, enough evidence points to a Big Bang having occurred. No, not enough evidence exists to accept within reasonable doubt that the whole of existence was once infinitesimally and near-eternally tiny.
I might be way off the mark with my scepticism of the pre-Big Bang universe, but this exercise isn’t about me, and it isn’t about a subatomic cosmos; it’s about you, and it’s about not taking everything as true.
Critical thinking isn’t ultimately about right or wrong, or nitpicking hypothetical science. At its core it’s about using your brain to learn, to consider, to weigh up facts and hypotheses, philosophies and speculations.
Flex your intellectual muscles, and exercise your freedom of thought, because the terminus is less important than the journey or the stimulating conversations and bonds you can form along the way.
PREREQUISITES FOR CRITICAL THOUGHT
Can there be such a thing as a critical thinker who follows an organised religion? Surely the co-existence of the two within one person’s psychological profile can not logically be justified.
Many of history’s philosophers and critical thinkers did indeed prescribe to orthodox religion – or, rather, so history tells us – but how many of them might, if they were alive today, lean towards atheism or deism instead, or just outright admit that they, as critical thinkers, could not conscionably accept the existence of a cosmic daddy-figure?
Critical thinking doesn’t leave room for acceptance of religion into a person’s life, not alongside the abundant lack of evidence for the existence of ‘divine’ beings who, as the concepts that they are, have no ability to impinge upon any sensory apparatus, whether human or technological. There is too much evidence to disprove not only all the extinct faith systems (such as sun gods and nature deities,) but also to disprove the vast bulk of claims made by extant religions.
Many of yesterday’s prolific creators, artists and philosophers probably arrived at the same conclusion as all those who were burned alive at the stake or otherwise murdered for their denial of God, so who could honestly blame these brilliant minds for considering it healthier to keep their most inner opinions to themselves, to pretend agreement for the sake of staying alive?
Common sense, logic and universal understanding are on a slow rise to prominence, and I am proud to be one of those who prescribes to observing our surrounding universe and facing its cold truths with a heavy heart, rather than blindly allowing myself to be smothered by ancient ideologies based simply upon fear and control with more than a smidgen of wishful thinking.
I am not a theist; I treat such beliefs with the scorn and distrust they deserve. I am often labelled as an atheist, but, while true, this term is not entirely accurate. Before the rise of questions that formed the pre-Semitic proto-religions there were fewer and fewer nonsensical ideas the further back in pre-history we go. Of that I have no doubt, for early homo sapiens possessed only a rudimentary communication system that could not convey anything more than basic conceptual notions. He would, for instance, have great difficulty in expressing a simple form of erroneous philosophy such as “The sun gives us warmth, therefore it gives us life, therefore it created us.” Nor could he have preached the opinion, “Something must have created all that we can see.” Without reaching such conclusions, there could be no debate against them. Such primitive men and women who existed prior to the proto-Indo European languages were not called atheists, because there was also no such thing as a theist (from theos, Greek for god.) Without the notion that gods could exist, the philosophical pendulum could not swing in the opposing extremity of there being no gods.
Even the term critical thinker seems, to me, a bit of a dramatic label. Perhaps the simplest way to describe someone such as myself would be as a realist, an atrributor of logic, a logic that has no roots in mysticism whatsoever.
The way I see it, the prerequisites for an unhampered thought process and a conveyance of intricate and deep ideas must surely be a language capable of communicating complex abstracts and philosophies and scientific observations, and also a mind that is not held back by possessing a belief in an unproven and unprovable concept. The more religion that is inside a person’s head, the less they are able to form truly free, or critical, thoughts.
THE ATHEISM ONION
I’m a natural atheist. I don’t say I was born atheist, because I didn’t know my arse from my elbow when I was a baby, just as none of us did. But as my own self-awareness began to hard-wire itself, so the realisation grew in me that the religion of Christianity – which was a vague but constant presence throughout my childhood – was nothing more than archaic traditional thinking. In this respect, I was able to form critical thoughts, albeit at a rather basic level, at a particularly young age.
Critical thinking calls for being able to see all points from non-linear perspectives, to ponder all possibilities and arrive at the decisions which make the most logical and reasonable sense, especially based on gathered evidence which either reinforces or rebuts a given proposal, such as ‘God exists; make your case, for or against’.
I could formulate complex and abstract thoughts long before my age reached double digits; I asked questions – mostly of m
yself rather than my family. I used library tickets I received as a present for my seventh birthday to borrow fiction novels from the local library. More importantly, I also read encyclopedias, books of knowledge, and the dictionary. That’s right, I actually chose to open the dictionary and flick through the pages, randomly landing on words and their meanings. I still do that today. As I approach the end of my fourth decade of life, my critical thinking has become like an aged whisky.
I never did need all those snowy, babe-in-manger nativity scenes to give me a warm feeling on a cold December night. It was never essential for me to surround myself with my fellow villagers or townsfolk to sing Onward Christian Soldiers in order to feel an uplifting sense of belonging; the need to belong was never in me. And I often wondered at a very young age why my parents and grandparents seemed to believe in the Tooth Fairy and insisted on making me put my teeth under the pillow to be replaced by 50p pieces while I slept. Even at such a young age, I wondered, “How old do you think I am?”
As with theism (the belief in and the following of an organised religion) there ought to be varying levels set into a lack of belief. With theists, you’ve got those who say they believe in God but have never read the Bible, who don’t go to church, don’t much care either way, really. Then you’ve got your moderates, your devouts, and your extremists. There are plenty more labels, but that covers it succinctly enough.
With a lack of belief, then, there must be similar levels. You can’t pour all non-believers into the same bucket, because we’re not the same. How this isn’t openly recognised is somewhat surprising. I know people recognise “agnostic atheists”, so why not recognise “die-hard atheists”, “life-long atheists”, “converted atheists”, “tentative atheists”, etc.?
It’s unquestionable that there are many atheists who simply grew up in an atheistic community or a country where religious faith is held only by a very small percentage of the population – for instance, Sweden. Now, I’m sure many Swedish folk have given the whole debate some considerable thought, but I’m also sure that just as many have never consciously considered it at all. For them, not believing in a god-figure is just how it is. It was similar in my childhood village; many of the older folk were “churchies”, but many others didn’t believe in God, although, to my observations, a vast chunk of those could barely manage to form cohesive thoughts at all. Such people could have been receptive to the influence of religion, if subjected to it and impressioned by it for long enough. Can such an individual conscionably be labelled as a “natural atheist” or any other uncompromising title? Of course they can’t. These atheists are the skin of the onion, while individuals such as myself and many of my idols (he said tongue in cheek) such as Neil deGrasse Tyson and Brian Cox, and the late Christopher Hitchens and Isaac Asimov, are right at the core of the atheism onion.