The first and most obvious gift the weekly church service gave me was boredom – and its child, imagination. Compelled into motionless silence for a full hour every week while the language and imagery of the mass washed over us, we children were forced to draw upon our own minds for amusement. The effect on me, I’m convinced, was to bring into being an expansive and sovereign inner world.

 

There was also something about the stillness and the absence of the parental gaze – ostensibly fixed on events at the altar – which allowed a feeling of supreme privacy. That small pocket of space between my seat, the kneeler and the back of the pew in front of me seemed an inviolately secluded world. When I recall the church, it’s not the altar and the priest I think of but the floorboards, the yellow woodgrain of the pews, the green baize carpet and the musty shadows beneath the seats, the lozenges of stained-glass light falling across my knuckles clasped in “prayer”. Of course everything about me was clearly visible to my parents or any other nearby adult the whole time, but it didn’t feel that way: I felt luxuriously invisible.

 

Paradoxically then, it was this stern constraint of time and space each week in church that allowed the blossoming of an inner freedom.

Read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/oct/23/confessions-of-an-atheist-writer-charlotte-wood-on-catholicism-and-the-art-instinct


These recollections from Charlotte Wood, an Australian writer and atheist, are a bit of fresh air in a room full of religious farts. Old farts with their own website and constipated motions. Charlotte is of course more politely lyrical, I am not...

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Yes, now, we have a couple of “non-atheist” who discuss beliefs versus atheism. It’s painful and unfair. One is a mathematician, John Lennox, and the other one is an actor. Enter Hercules: 

Actor Kevin Sorbo is on a mission to prove that science and religion go hand-in-hand, with Sorbo teaming up with mathematician, philosopher and former Oxford professor John Lennox to "unpack theological and scientific proof of God" in the new film "Against the Tide: Finding God in an Age of Science."

And while the veteran actor — known for his starring roles in "Hercules" and "God's Not Dead," among a plethora of other films and shows — has been diving into faith projects more in recent years, his faith roots run deep.

Read more:
https://www.christianpost.com/entertainment/actor-kevin-sorbo-on-atheism-and-the-science-of-god.html


Deep rooted faith does not make a truth, but an entrenched series of branching lies. Sciences and religions do not mix.

The arguments are always the same.

John Lennox, the mathematician, is a worry. He tells us without looking at it:

"Either human intelligence ultimately owes its origin to mindless matter; or there is a Creator. It is strange that some people claim that it is their intelligence that leads them to prefer the first to the second.”

Read more:
https://www.johnlennox.org/about

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This view by Lennox is heavily arrogant. He should loose weight (theologically speaking). What is intelligence? What is life? Isn’t life a certain organisation of mindless matter that gave rise to RNA and DNA in evolution? Or are we living on a planet where god-the-puppeteer is playing with the strings of several billions humans and several billions animals and several billion carrots? This does not make sense... 

Mindless matter can generate “intelligence”. This can easily be proven by people slowly sliding into dementia. Their intelligence is diminishing due to the slow disintegration of the organisation of mindless matter in their brains. Some people are born with less intelligence than others — or to say with less ability to comprehend or act according to the ability of the majority of people. Often these people are classed as dumb or “retarded” (obsolete). The action of “drugs” (consciousness and intelligence modifiers) on our ability to be less (or more) intelligent should give you an indication that matter, including dumb matter (“mindless matter” such as alcohol) can interfere with our level of imbecility.

Meanwhile. religious views or atheism has nothing to do with our compassion which is based on a humanitarian choice. Daily, our compassion is flaunted by our desires of greed, envy and even "justice" — fake justice with weird ways to apply laws that are flawed, like in the case of Julian Assange.

This is why the major religious nuts have inferred the existence of a soul, exclusive to humans, which is independent of intelligence (or mind). It's a neat trick. This is a stupid use of deceit, designed to make you feel part of an exclusive godly group. What rot. You still have to go to the crapper...

Has not god given some basic intelligence of choice to some species, like monkeys and dogs, but not to carrots? 

So what is science? As Bertolt Brecht told us in a simple phrase: “The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error…” 

John Lennox, I hope you understand this... Sciences and religions do not mix.

Why would god create an immense expanding universe, designed like a sloping electric billiard table with black holes, burning suns, electronic zappers and little levers that we control to a point by pressing buttons, with a speed limit? Ah I see, we have been given the "reason" that He (god is a male) needed some help to defeat “evil”. And WE’re the help. Goodness me! Are you kidding? We're idiots!

And not only this, should we behave badly — contrarily to His (god is a male) ten commandments, we’ll rot in hell for eternity. What a score! Why create us, sinners, in the first place, if He (god is a male) knows we’re going to spend that long with our arse on fire?

Religion is a trick of mind control, like Santa Claus… “Who’s been good, who’s been naughty, boys and girls?…” You believe in Santa Claus, don’t you Mr Lennox?

Then we’re asked to “believe” in a guy who was nailed to a cross in order to redeem our naughty original sin, whatever this is, while the guy who betrayed him, Judas, regrets his betrayal and commits suicide. But the whole caper of the crucifixion would not work without Judas’ betrayal… Only dumb people are prepared to believe this silly stuff, the script of which would not pass the editors of Midsummer Murders. 
The whole caper is designed to control people in a social environment, through brainwashing. Meanwhile, we have to sort out our own incomplete nature. Our incomplete nature is not a sin, but it should allow for the blossoming of an inner freedom, personally within the reach of a beneficial social construct, without destroying the planet — which is on the cards, if we carry on as is.

So two religious dudes discuss atheism. This is unfair on atheists. We don’t have the opportunity to show our relative reasoning, while the “religious guys" are doing it on our behalf in a very slanted and loaded manner to suit their delusion. 

We are told that John Lennox debated Richard Dawkins on “The God Delusion” in the University of Alabama (2007) and on “Has Science buried God?” in the Oxford Museum of Natural History (2008). He has also debated Christopher Hitchens on the New Atheism (Edinburgh Festival, 2008) and the question of “Is God Great?” (Samford University, 2010), as well as Peter Singer on the topic of “Is there a God?” (Melbourne, 2011). Furthermore, he has participated in public discussions on similar topics with many other academics on campuses around the world.

John Lennox has been a very busy boy, polluting the space between the ears of gullible students with crap. Lennox may be intelligent enough to do wonders with mathematical equations, but on theology and sciences, he stinks like a rotten pile of compost and I am too kind.

He has written copious amount of stuff trying to marry sciences an religion — on the interface between science, philosophy and theology. These include God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?(2009), God and Stephen Hawking, a response to The Grand Design (2011), Gunning for God, on the new atheism (2011), and Seven Days that Divide the World, on the first chapters of Genesis (2011). He has also written a number of books exploring biblical themes, including Against the Flow (2015), on the topic of Daniel, Determined to Believe? (2017), on the the subject of free will and God’s sovereignty, Joseph (2019), on the story in Genesis, and the ‘Key Bible Concepts’ series, co–written with David Gooding (in the 1990s). His most recent titles are Have no Fear (2018), on evangelism today, Can Science Explain Everything? (2019), on the relationship between science and Christianity, and the six–part ‘Quest for Reality and Significance’ series co–written by David Gooding (2018–9). Furthermore, in addition to over seventy published mathematical papers, he is the co–author of two research level texts in algebra in the Oxford Mathematical Monographs series.

So far none of those books by John Lennox make any sense, because there is no sense in religious beliefs. As Gus Leonisky might have said, Lennox is a bore — a deceitful bore unless he is an ignorant bore… He is an unintelligent bore on a subject he froth a lot about (he's worried he might not go to heaven if he does not proselytise) but has no real fix on the enormity of his delusion. The question is not “can science explain everything” but why “is religion an infinite error” (and will the believers understand this?)?
Meanwhile, Hercules was a fictional character in the same vein as god has been, since a few someones, often calling themselves prophets, priests and kings, tried to put a semblance of social order in an unruly mob of warriors, young ones and peasants, while making sure women were inferior slaves of the system, with a semblance of respect. The monkeys make as much sense.


GL.
Fierce atheist.