New Survey: Those With No Religion Fastest-Growing Tradition

That's a fair question.

Dear Kathleen, although I wouldn't describe myself as 'proud', I'm simply a historian seeking the truth within the myths of what happened thousands of years ago, pride doesn't come into it, (truth is simply truth, even if it goes against belief, it's still just 'truth', it doesn't have feelings) the reason this particular atheist doesn't give his real name is because unfortunetely there are some fundamentalist whack jobs out there who may take offence at my seeking of truth, especialy if my findings disagrees with Biblical records and besides, it is also common sense to never give any personal details out on the internet in this day and age of computer hackers.

I could have chosen to use a more realistic name, and you would never have even realised it wasn't my real name, but that would be like lying, and as a seeker of truth, that goes against my morals.

Sadly, that's the truth of modern civilisation, people do exist who wish to silence people like me or even do harm to us, simply for disagreeing with their beliefs, I have a family, so you can obviously understand my use of a nom de plume.

Still, I don't see why a non de plume should get in the way of good, healthy debate, the whole point of debate is to attempt to get one's opinion across and have it tested, not to swap personal details.

I notice with disappointment that you refer to me as 'sad', however I assure you, I'm quite happy. If however that remark was meant as an insult, could I invite you to justify your opinion of me by supplying empirical evidence to the contrary of my own research?

Proud Atheist

How come the proud atheist cannot sign his/her name? How proud are you? I hope you can find your way before your life is over. Where do you think you are going? All dressed up with nowhere to go. Sad.

And furthermore...

We can actualy trace Abrahamic religion to a source. We know that Christianity and Islam developed from Judaism, but what did Judaism develop from?

Before 1000BC Semitic polytheism was the religion of the region (Canaan) with a pantheon of gods led by a head deity called 'El' who was regarded as the creator of humankind and all creatures and the husband of the Mother Goddess Asherah. We can link this 'El' to the Abrahamic God as 'El' is also one of the names used for the Abrahamic God. The archangel's names refer to him, Gabri-el means "Man of God", Rapha-el means "God's healing" ect.

But what caused their religion to become monotheistic?

Around 300 years beforehand, the pharoah Akhenaten developed the first known monotheistic religion which worshipped The Aten (the sun). This was an enforced religion that was very unpopular among the Egyptians and after Akhenaten's death, Egypt violently reverted back to polytheism, any Atenists would be driven out of Egypt (which nicely explains Exodus)

According to the Bible, around 1025 BC, several nomadic tribes united to form the United Kingdom of Israel and Judah. The only nomadic tribes we know about from before that time are the 'Habiru' who we know of from the 'Amarna letters' which were sent from leaders in Canaan to the Egyptian pharaohs, apparently the Habiru caused quite a lot of problems for the Canaanites by constantly raiding and invading their territories. They were a loose ethnic group formed out of outlaws from neighbouring agricultural societies and so would have made perfect allies of the outlawed Atenists from Egypt. The Habiru followed the same polytheistic mythology as the Cannanites, which itself was influenced by Mesopotamian mythology (which included the Epic of Gilgamesh, part of which tells how 'Utnapishtim' was warned by the water god 'Ea' that the world would be flooded and that he should build a boat to save his loved ones, which the Judaistic myth of Noah was obviously based upon and which itself is based upon even earlier Sumerian versions of the same myth) but historicaly, the Habiru suddenly disappear only to be replaced by the monotheistic 'Hebrews'.

These Hebrews were probably the same people as the Habiru but a generation or two later and with a religion that still worshipped El but was now monotheistic due to the influence of the Atenists. And we can still see the the influence of the Atenists on Judaism in Psalm 104 which has a remarkable similarity to the much earlier Great Hymn to the Aten.

Before the worship of the polytheistic pantheon of gods headed by the creator god 'El' existed, evidence shows that a form of solar deity worship was in place. Before then (the Neolithic Revolution) it was Mother Goddess worship and before that, ancestor worship.

This is essentialy the source of Abrahamic religion, and if truth exists anywhere within Abrahamic religion, it must logicaly exist here in abundance, before culture changed the original religion and it's meanings

I agree with Jeremiah Covington.

Genesis also gives the place of the creation of man as 'Eden'. The Bible relates the geographical location of both Eden and the garden to four rivers, the Pishon, Gihon, Tigris, and Euphrates. This gives us a geographical position of roughly the same place as Mesopotamia.

Yet we know that Homo Sapiens evolved in Africa at least 250,000 years ago and then spread from there around the globe.

But Mesopotamia was however the centre of the Neolithic Revolution (onset of agriculture between 12-7000 years ago)

'Paradise' is a Persian word meaning 'walled orchard' and is used as a synonym for the Garden of Eden, so it stands to reason that The Garden of Eden was probably an agricultural site.

And indeed, when we look archeologicaly at the Mesopotamian area where Eden was said to be, we find remains of the earliest known orchards.

Most crops can be grown in a single season, a mere matter of a few months, and the archeology shows a nomadic lifestyle that occasionaly settled in one place just long enough to grow a crop of some form of grain before harvesting it and moving on.

But the growing of fruit orchards takes much longer. A fruit tree can take years to grow big enough to have a harvest of any worth, so it's highly likely that the onset of growing fruit during the Neolithic Revolution was what really tempted man into settling in one permenant place. The hunter/gatherers would have originaly worshipped a provider deity but after man became agricultural a provider deity would not be needed and this is kinda confirmed by the sudden emergence of solar deity worship (worshiping the sun) at the same time as the Neolithic Revolution. (you need the sun to crow crops)

In most hunter/gather tribes nowadays, males and females have seperate roles, the men hunt, the women gather, but it doesn't end there.

Cirtain foods need quite complex processing to remove toxins and traditionaly only the women in the tribe know how to perform such techniques. Many tribes live in a similar way to the one I described earlier, nomadic but settling just long enough to grow a crop and harvest it before moving on, and it's usualy the women who do all the seed preperation sowing, tending and harvesting, while the men spend all day hunting in the surrounding area. So it's highly likely that it would have been the women who were responsible for the development of fruit growing techniques, which would more than likely be seen as 'secret knowledge' by the men.

It's easy to imagine that fruit trees would become known as 'trees of knowledge' and their fruit 'the fruit of knowledge' and the people responsible for this 'fruit of knowledge' and the subsequent rejection of the old deity in favour of a new one would be the women.

Writing was developed 6000 years ago in the same area of Mesopotamia, so the dating of mankind being 6000 years old actualy relates in reality only to the beginings of 'written' history, but this wasn't until 1000 years after the earliest known events in Eden.

Mr. Covington

I understand that you do not believe in the Bible, and that is your choice, but to state it is myth is as absurd as you believe the other statement. No science has come around to deny a creator. No science can explain why "the big bang" happened. No science can explain if evolution is correct, how (as in evolved to this point) does our blood clot to stop bleeding, and not too many people who even follow the "theory" (it has yet to be proven fact) of evolution even fully understand it.

You should know your enemy before making an attack on them. In the book of Genesis the third verse states God created light. This comes before the vegetation. So your argument, "holds no water", as they say.

Secondly, medicine and evolution are not studied by the same genre of science, even some of the earliest Christians studied medicine.

Also, what Mr. Morris could of been refering to is the fact that one sceintific theory states the solar system began as nebulae that pulled together as an accretionary disk by their gravitational forces (somewhat formless as Genesis 1 says). As the gravity pulls towards the center of this disk, the dust spins faster and becomes more compact and extremely hot, forming a proto-sun (not yet a sun, but gives off light). Similarities can be noted.

One Common Faith

Bahá’u’lláh taught that each of the world religions founded by a Manifestation of God, a term we use to refer to the Prophets who have arisen throughout history, including Abraham, Krishna, Moses, Buddha, Jesus, Muḥammad, The Báb, and Bahá’u’lláh, brought, in addition to the eternal spiritual truths have held true through all the ages, the essential laws and teachings to carry humanity through a certain stage of its development. So, for example, Moses brought the teachings that brought the Jews to the height of civilization, such that anyone who met a man of good character in that day would commonly exclaim "Surely, he is an Israelite!," but as human nature set in and perverted the essential spiritual truths of His Faith until only the outward form remained, Jesus came to renew the Faith. Muḥammad, also, uplifted the barbaric tribes of Arabia, who commonly buried their own infant daughters alive, to the heights of civilization, which illumined both the eastern and western worlds and led them on several centuries of moral, spiritual, and material development. In this day and age a new message is necessary, which has been brought by Bahá’u’lláh, who has fulfilled the ever-present promises of a return of the Prophet of every Faith.

In this day and age, as His Faith establishes itself, mankind is instinctively turning away from the forms of religion, that while still valid in their essential spiritual doctrines and their ability to bring a human being nearer to his or her Creator, which is the inmost longing of every soul, are impotent to address the moral, spiritual, and material issues facing humanity today. Specifically, we are now faced with the desperate need to establish a peaceful and unified world civilization, the likes of which no previous period of history has seen or even conceived of establishing.

If you are specifically interested in learning more about the Baha'i perspective on the decline of the established organized religions, I would strongly recommend reading this document:

http://reference.bahai.org/en/t/bic/OCF/ocf-2.html

Genesis and The Physical Universe

Genesis is written as historical fact including exact ages of people, specific events and locations and specific names. In order to believe it, you have to believe that all 50 chapters are accurate. You cannot say that the first 3 are allegory while the rest is fact.

Genesis 2 states that God created the Earth and vegetation before he created the sun and the moon. This is clearly impossible.

Genesis 3 describes the "fall of man" and says that the first two humans who lived 6,000 years ago committed an act of disobedience that accounts for mankind's negative impulses or "sin nature." However, the physical universe disagrees with this. Homo sapiens have been around for at least 195,000 years and having evolved there is no way that the Adam & Eve story can be true. The downside to this is that the story of "redemption" is based entirely on this story of the fall of man. Even Paul makes this clear when he compares the "first Adam" to the "second Adam." But the story of the first Adam is a myth and therefore all the rest that follows is a house of cards. In short, the entire thing is nonsense.

If you believe that Genesis is merely an attempt by early man to understand the nature of the universe, you cannot say that the Bible is a work of divine revelation. The creator would not have "revealed" something as patently absurd as Genesis 1-3.

Additionally, if the "sin nature" is a spiritual problem, how is it possible that medications and neurological modifications can alter those behaviors that we attribute to sin? (It wasn't that long ago that people with physical mental illnesses were regarded as being demon possessed.)

You see, reason trumps mythology every time. And that is why more and more of us consider ourselves to have "no religion." We do not worship science or reason. We do not attend services telling us stories about these things in order to perpetuate our particular mythology. We simply oserve the universe that we live in and wonder at it.

what is religion?

"It is impossible for a person to have no religion. If you believe in a materialistic world which came about through natural and unaided events of evolution in time and space in a time span of 4.6 billion years+/-, then that is your religion (just another ONE of many)."

This is one of the many patronizing comments we who are not religious hear often from those who are. Scientific knowledge has nothing in common with religious faith. They are neither comparable nor mutually exclusive.

"No Religion"? Impossibe!!

It is impossible for a person to have no religion. If you believe in a materialistic world which came about through natural and unaided events of evolution in time and space in a time span of 4.6 billion years+/-, then that is your religion (just another ONE of many). That is what you believe.

However, in my opinion, there has been no new scientific findings that disproves anything about my faith, Christianity, and if anything they only support it. For example, with a little research and reasoning, one can see the similarities in the beginning of Genesis and the scientific explanation of the beginning of the world. And I remind you Genesis was written 6000+ years ago.

You know, I commonly explain to people there is a difference between being informed and having intelligence, or the ability to understand (Many of our founding forefathers were self educated people). It is much easier for a person to form an opinion off what they are informed upon, and have no thought of the author's agenda or possibly their own, rather than persuing their own intellectual capacity and use reasoning and research together with an open mind to form their own opinion.

morality

It is pretty sad for anyone to think that they can buy morality with a book (bible)... and the trouble with religion is the separatism it creates. Whose god is the right god? What is this poppycock about being saved by the blood of Jesus?

I've heard all the arguments before. Everyone gets a chance to repent and accept Jesus into their hearts. Well not everyone. There are still tribes in the middle of timbuktoo that won't ever know Jesus, thankfully.

Think about what makes a cult, and then you might see your religion right there...Some folks need something to hold onto however, a crutch, because they are so screwed up by so called do-gooder parents that they need something to hold onto.