The Atheist Manifesto (Draft II)
by Eric Portelance and Toulouse-Antonin Roy
Updated: April 26 2004
Religion
is a drug, a form of mind control that gives people the false illusion
that a
supernatural being watches their every action. Religious doctrines
enforce the believer with the idea his religion is superior over all
others, and he
is the one that will attain salvation and not the Muslim, Christian or
Jewish
infidel of the other faiths. In other words, this shows how biased
religion can
be; we all know religion is based on age old books written by prophets
and
disciples who obviously all had different opinions and views on what
their
respective prophet said. Thus, every holy book from the Old Testament
to the Koran is
filled with contradictions and beliefs that aren’t even the views of
the respective
prophet himself, and these books are nothing more than a compilation of
short stories
and morals that do nothing more than confuse the reader. Another biased
factor in these
holy books is the fact they tell the believer not to question God but
rather to accept
and submit to him which is contradictory because the whole idea of
religion is to
decipher the meaning of life through the idea of a higher power.
Religion also
creates prejudice, hate and warfare by pitting these different
religious
doctrines against each other with the idea of one religion’s God being
superior
to another. But even with all these known contradictions, why does one
cling to God and refuse to accept rational thought? It’s a very complex
question
that requires quite a simple answer; human beings fear the unknown,
they
fear anything that isn’t of this world, they fear death, the afterlife
and
they spend their whole lives questioning how they came to be, and it is
this
simplistic notion of a creator figure or the so-called creation myth
that enables
the common human being to accept religion as the answer to the meaning
of
their existence. However we Atheists have come to accept rational
thought,
refuse and defy the dogmatic authoritarian ways of religion and instead
of working
hard through meaningless nonsense such as prayer to one day have our
seat in
the so-called kingdom of God, we work toward building heaven on earth,
the
utopia every man and woman dreams of, the utopia where all are equal
and the
status-quo is a constant state of harmony.