I am an atheist

I am back from Berlin, laptopless (my iBook G4 was stolen). It will take a while apparently for the new laptop to get here so until then I am forced to use a PC at the office.

In Berlin I managed to buy a book I have wanted to read for some time. It is called The God Delusion and it is written by Richard Dawkins, a University of Oxford professor. I have not yet finished it but the first chapters got me also to watch the brilliant two-part documentary The Root of All Evil?. The book and the TV series complement each other and they voice an important point, which is something that everyone needs to know. If you can, please read the book.

The author essentially argues that the world would be better off without organised religion as it is today. Think about it: most of the conflicts that exist today are faith-based. Israel/Palestine, US/Iraq, Northern Ireland, the terrorist attacks, etc. Those conflicts cannot be won or successfully resolved, because they are based on false realities. How is it possible that grown-up individuals need an ancient fairy-tale to tell them what to do? Why is it so strange when someone believes he is Peter Pan, but when a person believes in a sky-god that somehow (micro)manages the lives of billions of people and who has created the Earth in six days it is OK?

There is a reason for this: the God delusion is believed by very many people. They get a sense of unity, belonging and meaning out of it. But is that worth living a lie? A lie that is extremely dangerous as it causes harm and deaths of many people. The more people are religious, the worse it is to live in this world as each people in each religion try to overcome the others and fight over holy lands or some other nonsensical concepts.

Therefore I agree with Richard Dawkins completely and when I first was sitting on the fence on religion (I did not care much about it), I now think that religion is evil. And if religion is evil, there should be no freedom of religion, there should be freedom from religion.

But would a world would be a bleak, meaningless and hopeless place without Christianity, Judaism or Islam? No. Albert Einstein said: “What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.”

The Earth, the nature and its people are so complex, beautiful and inspirational that it seems almost disrespectful of them to state that these were created by some magical higher being. Instead, we can believe in the evolution of life, as proven by scientific theories, which are based on scientific facts. Sure, there is a lot we do not know about our world, but that makes it interesting to live here rather than wait for the afterlife.