Grombles

Regular readers will be under no allusions that I don't favour putting blind faith in stories percolating through the minds of ancient bearded-ones. They brainwashed children and terrified poorly educated adults who were never encouraged to ask:- 'is this likely?' If you're reading this, you're probably already an atheist - otherwise why search for writings about it when atheism simply means 'no faith in fairy-tales'. It's a non-subject... unless you happen to be imprisoned in some barking mad regime like Saudi for failing to chant some meaningless bollocks from a holy book with enough conviction to fool the faith police. What sort of god has to  force people into believing 'his word' and then punishes them if they question it? So much for omnipotent and merciful.   And if faith makes so much sense, why issue laws to prevent people from worshipping someone else's nonsense? Surely if your brand of faith is right and it works for you, it is a n

Have you noticed that the poorer a country, the more likely it is to be fanatical about religion (except the USA of course - but I bet you can correlate religiosity against educational achievement and therefore poverty there too). The government of Bangladesh, one of the world's poorest countries and inevitably therefore a religious stronghold, has arrested 3 atheist bloggers from a list of 84 provided to them by a bunch of islamic 'informers'. Quite apart from the legitimacy of these whistle-blowers to determine who should be arrested and who not, even if you believe in supercomputers in the sky watching and controlling every Higgs Boson (etc) in the universe rather than trusting there is a scientific answer for everything (whether we yet comprehend it or not), you have to agree that freedom of thought beats brainwashing - especially when imposed by the state. If there really is a deity, then assuming it/he/she (!) is simply not a control-freak having Olympian fun at o