computer fixed

i got my motherboard in the mail, re-assembled my computer in about 15 minutes, and got it fixed perfectly! it was easy! now i finally have a working computer again! and i applied at lots of temp agencies. my sister came home to visit the parents and me for a few days, and our nuclear family was finally whole once again. however, the lawnmower is acting up, and not working right. but it is so great to have a working computer again!

now sometimes people might read some of my blog posts where i am down on religion, and wonder, why do i hate religion so much? well, just about everything i have ever heard about religion is bad. especially in history books. or in the news. and religion does not even make sense. i think it distorts people’s reasoning and keeps them from thinking logically, and makes them come to the wrong moral judgements on a very consistent basis. so, what is so wrong with religion? here is a little summary:

the crusades. the spanish inquisition. european colonialists, imperialists, and missionaries, who went out and conquered the world, and taught its people they were inferior to and subservient to white people. all of the great religious leaders being men (jesus, muhammad, buddha, moses, abraham, l. ron hubbard, j.r. “bob” dobbs, etc.). cults like scientology, or crazy suicide cults like heaven’s gate, or david koresh, or jim jones, or sun myung moon. the dark ages in europe, when people were kept illiterate, uneducated, and enslaved as serfs, and religion was used to keep people down. the israeli-palestinian conflict, where both sides are motivated by religion to kill and destroy, because they think the same land belongs to them, because their god told them so. pat robertson and jerry falwell saying that 9/11 happened because of gays, feminists, and the aclu. islamic terrorists, who kill us because their religion tells them to. the destruction of the great scientific knowledge of past civilizations, by monks in the dark ages. the persecution of great scientists like galileo. the salem witch burnings. abortion clinic bombings. people who oppose saving the environment because they think that the rapture is coming and that god gave mankind domain to exploit the earth. the “promise keepers”, who think women should be like slaves to men. how back in the 1800s and earlier, religion was used all the time to justify slavery. you see, if you study history, and if you look at how religion is used today, it is very very clear that religion is an evil force in this world. it is a force of destruction and violence, a force of hate and oppression, a force of irrational disregard for logic and reason. how can you possibly trust the judgement of a person who cannot tell the difference between fantasy and reality? you see, i see no difference between an obscure ufo cult and a major world religion. i see no difference between the infamous preacher fred phelps of topeka, kansas, and any other preacher. to me, all religion is the same. to me, all religion is dangerous and evil. i cannot believe anything unless i have proof that it is true. to me, it seems like insanity for someone to believe something without proof. the very concept of god is self-contradictory, as i have often discussed. i think, even if a religious person is the most nonviolent pacifist in the world, they are still a dangerous force, because they base their beliefs on something that is unproven and almost certainly untrue. there is simply no way to verify that a person who is religious is able to act in their own enlightened self-interest, since religion can delude people into thinking things like “slavery is right” or “we should burn her because she is a witch” or “the end of the world will happen within 5 years so it does not matter if we destroy the planet”. in today’s world of weapons of mass destruction, where there are enough nuclear weapons to end all human life many times over, i feel tremendously unsafe having religious people in charge of nuclear weapons. what if they actually believe they will go to heaven when they die and that the end of the world is going to happen soon anyway, and think they are a part of fulfilling some ancient prophecy? what if they think god will protect us from our enemy’s nuclear weapons, even as we nuke our enemy to smithereens? there is simply no way “mutual assured destruction” can work if either side seriously believes in religion. i think that religion is basically the #1 threat to the continued survival of humanity. now maybe there is good religion and bad religion. i don’t know. i do not understand religion one iota; it seems like complete nonsense to me. i think someone can only really be trusted if they do not believe in religion, because then, they are likely to act in their own self-interest, and if they are smart enough, it will be their enlightened self-interest. and if someone is acting in their enlightened self-interest, their behavior is fairly predictable, and they will certainly not go around killing people for no reason, or doing other crazy things that religious people do. you see, how is the religion of a typical american different from the religion of an islamic suicide bomber? sure, they would worship jesus instead of allah, but really, does christianity have a better track record than islam, in historical terms? what about the great religious wars of europe, crusades, inquisitions, witch burnings, etc.? and why do people claim that only members of their own religion go to heaven, and everyone else is damned for all eternity? i cannot see how that would be a justifiable, since there are good people and bad people in all belief systems. the problem with religion is, it turns good people bad, and makes violence and killing happen unnecessarily. the most religious people in the world are the terrorists. the least religious people in the world never cause any problems for anybody. because, if someone is so non-religious that they do not believe anything strongly, they are certainly not going to believe in a cause strongly enough to be willing to die for it... they are more likely to just go along with things and try not to get in the way, or offer some mild resistance to things they think are probably bad, until things get too unpleasant for them to continue their opposition. of course, nobody is 100% non-religious, certainly not me, for instance. i still believe in some things. i know, it is bad, to believe things without proof. but, for some reason, it seems to be inescapable, part of the human condition, to find yourself adopting certain viewpoints and positions and beliefs. it is not something that i wished would happen to me, but it did happen, and i am sort of a pawn in this game. my beliefs are a result of things i have heard or read, things said or written by other people, and really they are not an original product of my mind. they have thus been corrupted through repeated imperfect communication from one person to another, just as a religion gets corrupted because beliefs cannot be taught, as they come from within. a religion can be wonderful and benevolent, like the religion that jesus christ tried to teach his followers, but then become a horrible malignant force, oppressing humanity, setting back scientific advances a thousand years, and generally causing more problems than it solves. i do not think it is good to have an outlook based on unthinking devotion to a certain set of beliefs. so, for example, although i believe in evolution and global warming and the promise of embryonic stem cell research, this is simply because i have heard time and time again that the vast majority of scientists believe in these things, and all of the peer-reviewed papers in those fields also uphold those viewpoints, and i believe that the scientific method produces superior factual results than any other method of human inquiry. this does not by any means mean that i think any of those things is infallible, as i think nothing is infallible. but, i think those ideas are inherently superior to anything faith-based like creationism. i simply do not believe that religious fundamentalists have anything even remotely similar to a realistic viewpoint about any subject where they disagree with the scientific consensus. on what do they base their claims? some book that is full of contradictions that was used to justify slavery and war and oppression? or actual impartial objective reproducible experiments where people actually observe how things really work in the world around us? religion and science have such a long history of being at odds that i think religion has thoroughly discredited itself. and that is why i dislike it so much.