Welcome
As I understand it, there are large portions of the human populous that seems to have lost touch with reality. These people, although usually harmless, are wasting their lives with superstition and pseudo knowledge and passing on this wasteful thinking to their children and are thus influencing the course of human history in a most savage manner.
The following are a series of analogies designed to assist these unfortunate beings to find their way around reality (BTW, welcome to it).
You are conceived, congratulations.
Although you may not remember this (you did not yet have a brain), you were once a single haploid type cell spawned from one of your father’s seminiferous tubules and containing his DNA. This is analogous to information copied to a piece of paper and folded to a paper airplane ready to be shot off to its destination. Not perfectly copied of course. The information may be compared to digital quaternary nucleoside information as it is a pared double helix comprised of deoxyribonucleic acid sequences, but the copying method is analog, so errors are inevitable. Much like a 33K analog modem. The information being transported is digital as it is on at least one abstract level binary but it is carried using an analog method: Modulated and demodulate sound signals.
Don’t worry, most mistakes don’t even show up as “mistakes”. And if they do it’s either something that will make your life easier (better social, thinking skills, stronger bones, etc..) or something that won’t -in which case, sorry, but that’s life for ya. If you were born blind for example, it was pure bad luck. Not a space god that made you that way.
So, where was I? Ah, yes. So, you’re this paper airplane, ready for take off. Skipping a few details now, but you somehow managed to make it. Btw, did I mention you weren’t alone? You weren’t alone nor was there anything particularly special about you. There were about half a billion other cells, more or less just like you that came along with you. They didn’t make it. No “miracle of birth” for them! 
But you did make it and brought over your dad’s DNA and fused with your mom’s counter gamete, an egg. This part is like installing an operating system on a computer. Living beings fit enough to do so have been reproducing and giving birth to countess individuals in some form or another for billions of years, passing on their DNA to the next generation. Long story short, there was nothing inexplicable or miraculous about your conception or birth.
You are born. Huzzah.
Skipping the parts where you develop from a single celled organism to a humanoid in about 9 months while having a parasitic relationship with your mother, you are born from the same orifice through which you were conceived. I have an analogy for this too, but frankly it’s too gross. So, I’ll use another one. The moment of your birth can be compared to turning on computer for the first time after you have installed Windows.
This is the part where I attack your parents
In contemporary human societies, the techniques used for preparing children for adult life are a combination evolutionary by-products. In order of teaching as your age progresses, these can be altruistic, cultural, social and -most anthropologically recent- religious elements.
Altruistic behavior
The application of these behaviors are logically evolved, keeping you and by proxy your offspring alive. These are basic forms of behavior towards children that when genetically absent in an individual would prevent its child from surviving – cutting off the genetic line.
Cultural
These are for example the teaching of the local language, giving you a name, recording the date of your birth, etc. It could also be the indoctrination of certain prejudices, the rudimentary teaching of your local religion and some forms of practices and behavior.
Social
These usually involve the teaching of skills required to survive in your social environment. Teaching of social interaction skills, going to school. Inadvertently this may also be drug use, religious addiction, overeating, greed, etc.
Religious and superstitious rituals
Most cultures have primitive rituals that are taught to people that have recently joined their society, either by birth or migration. In case of children, these rituals, religious rules and principles are usually imposed upon them by force. The mental capacities and the susceptible nature of a child’s mind are taken advantage of or abused to do so. This abuse is traditionally considered acceptable by the culture due to a human inability to spontaneously recognize gradual changes in cultural behavior. This behavior can thus only be recognized as abuse when one is either outside of such a system or has comparative information on multiple diverse forms of religious practices.
As an observer of human behavior it is not my place to criticize the abuse of impressionable minds by other humans. But as a member of the human race, I can neither condone it nor can I leave this despicable, archaic and primitive act unmentioned.
Of course it isn’t just children that are systematically abused into believing in these rituals thus passing on the religious information to their offspring like a virus. Adults are as susceptible to such psychological coercion as children.
In some societies the abuse is so far reaching and so systematic, that most people in these cultures don’t even realize their own mental demise. In some societies, the religious psychological abuse and its further perpetuation is even a prerequisite to holding high positions of rule and status.
This is where I point you out and the analogy for religion
It may be a brutally objective point of view, but all cognitively sound human beings are susceptible to deceit. It is something that we as humans must recognize before we can understand and appreciate the world around us with the limit first-hand bio sensory tools that we have naturally evolved so far.
Religion is a corrupting problem for humanity as it clouds our judgement and anchors us from the pursuit of social, technological and cultural progress. In an objective analysis, the way in which religion is propagated by its institutions and its fans can best be compared to Münchausen syndrome by proxy. The parent imposes an illness to the child in order to make the child more dependent on the parent. The child then becomes the parent imposing the illness to its own offspring and so on.
If you were “brought up religious” it is important to know that you weren’t born with any religion. The religion you currently subscribe to was most likely determined by where and when you were born and the religion of your parents. It is not more truthful than the religion of the ancient Greeks, Romans, Norwegians, Aboriginals or Davidians or Templars.
Religions are literally all in your head.
A lack of scientific literacy in general society is a major factor in the propagation of mythical alternatives to reality. Sadly, this is often overlooked and with monopolized mass media spending less and less time on science and technology this trend is likely to continue for some time to come.
Why I am an Atheist
Calling atheism a religion is like calling bald a hair color or silence a symphony. Now that the analogy is out of the way, let me explain why all religions (Yes ALL OF THEM) are wrong.
When it comes down to serious notions of facts and truth, we like to prove things using the scientific method because (and sometimes despite) of its brutally objective nature. Facts are often referred to as “cold facts” because they counter our intuition, preconceptions and beliefs. The truth does not care.
Imagine standing in court being accused of a crime. Who would you rather have presenting evidence to the judge? A minister, a “holy” man (someone that states (s)he hears voices in his/her head that (s)he attributes to a supernatural father figure residing outside the realm of our reality), or someone with scientific information about your case? What do you think is more credible and convincing? Someone saying “I don’t believe (s)he did it because I know him/her very well and my god told me he didn’t do it.” or someone saying “I know (s)he couldn’t have done it because it is scientifically impossible due to evidence x,y,z.”
There has not been and will never be a so-called “holy” book written containing information gathered using the scientific method.
We can for the sake of argument ignore the fact that current “holy”-books were re-written numerous times to adjust for cultural progress and the scientific understanding of our world. And we can ignore the fact that they originated in myths and allegories during the bronze age and where handed down by word of mouth from one group of primitive people to the next.
What cannot be ignored is that the information is propagated using an environment that gives the impression to the observer that it must be true irrespective of its content. What also cannot be ignored is that illogical statements are asked by the propagator to either be ignored or accepted as truth using a plot device called “faith”. Faith is -from an objective point of view- basically an altruistic trust reflex used for building kinships and other auto reciprocal relationships, but is in this case exploited to propagate not unlikely information, but obviously false information.
Believing in a so-called “holy” book is thus literally nothing more than believing in a fantasy novel simply because it was presented to you by an authority figure as being truthfully real. Was that the sound of a bubble I hear bursting? I sure hope so.
I absolutely loved Star Trek: The Next Generation. I watched it ever since I knew it existed and even now I watch re-runs whenever they’re on. There are epic stories, there are powerful beings, there are emotional stories. That does not make them true. Not even if Gene Roddenberry himself where to read the scripts in person to me. Even the fans of that show re-build their houses to look like the bridge of a star ship, they still are sane enough to know, it’s just a TV show.
Fans of religions on the other hand tend to believe in the stories so much that they can easily be classified as psychologically insane by any standard applied to any other group of people.
Even if a Star Trek fan gathers enough funding to build a 1:1 model of a star ship, (s)he’s just a fan of a TV show and (s)he knows it. Religious people build massive buildings, arks, and other fictional objects from their books but with the minor difference that they believe the stories are true.
I am saddened by the fact that I have to share this world surrounded by an enormous majority that consists of primitive thinking people that continue to infect their way into almost every aspect of human life worldwide.
The reason I am an atheist is because the alternative is too depressing, too shortsighted, too small minded, too primitive, too backwards and most of all, it would be too insane for me to live by. I think, therefore I am an atheist.
