Atheist Ten Commandments
Paul P. O'Brien
From: "Paul P. O'Brien"
To: "Positive Atheism" <editor@positiveatheism.org>
Subject: Atheism in India I am sure you will like the Atheist Ten Commandments.
Date: Saturday, March 20, 1999 8:44 PM
I believe we can use a Humanist Ten Commandments and an Atheist Ten Commandments to help stop the spread of the Christian Ten Commandments into public school classrooms. Let's really fight for separation of church and state. We could offer to let them have the Christian Ten Commandments in public schools if they allowed our Atheist and Humanist Ten Commandments to be posted next to their's. I passed these out to all at a half way Christian Unitarian Universilist Church and it became Atheistic.
The Atheist Ten Commandments
1 -- Determine what is really moral by trusting your own mind.
Dr. Albert Ellis was head of the American Psychological Association for many years, wrote a book, that sold over a million copies. He tells us, "If you believe good, kind, moral, just, loving people, are going to be tortured in hell, forever, for not believing in Jesus, then you are a masochist, a schizophrenic, and very religious. You've lost your sense of what is rational, moral, logical and just. You need psychiatric help." He developed Rational Emotive Therapy to help people get over being mentally sick from their religious beliefs.
Atheist believe there is nothing more immoral or harmful to human happiness then having a belief that if you don't believe, what I belief, you will die and be tortured forever in hell. Believing in hell is being sick, sick, horribly sick.
2 -- It is time that the discrimination against humanist and atheist is eliminated.
Until 200 years ago Atheists and Humanist were hunted down by whatever religious group in power and burnt, tortured and murdered. Now they are discriminate against
3 -- Don't buy into any authoritarian belief.
"What if there were a single cause for many of the world's ills in both the social and personal spheres, from overpopulation, ecological destruction, ethnic violence and hatred, to addictions, conflicts between the sexes, the breakdown of the family, and even why it feels good to be bad? Sound too simplistic or far-fetched? Not according to Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad, authors of The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power (North Atlantic Books). A core underlying cause of all these problems, the pair contends, is hidden authoritarianism."
Buying into, communism, spiritual cults, organized religion, UFO cults, therapy cults, Jim Jones, David Koresh, Hitler or other authority beliefs where there is an unchallengeable book, ideology or leader generates self mistrust. It makes a person feel fundamentally mentally flawed. It causes you to look at evidence, logic, reason and what your mind would say is true, as garbage, you can not trust in, if it doesn't fit, the authority belief you bought into. "These authority beliefs are social viruses that, like a computer virus, makes our basic human operating system dysfunctional. Just as a computer operating system controls how the parts work together, they say, moral codes provide the operating system both for self-control and social interaction. "When the operating system is faulty, this produces distortions and malfunctions at all levels," say Alstad. As with computers, unmasking and decoding a virus allows one to disempower it," says Alstad." Buying into any religion does away with trust in your own mind and does away with uncorrupted critical thinking. Buying into an authority belief makes you a mental vegetable. The answer is to have courage enough to think for yourself.
4 -- Know that the more educated you are, the more likely you are a non-believer.
|
Religion Parents |
Eminent Scientist | |
Catholic |
5% |
0% |
Jewish |
29% |
22% |
Religious but |
4% |
23% |
Protestant |
53% |
22% |
Agnostic or |
8% |
45% |
The more educated a person is, the less likely they are religious. Only 9% of the eminent psychologists were religious.
5 -- Rely on Studies and readily observable evidence and keep questioning everything.
Studies show The Average humanist Makes More Money Than the average Christian.
A major study by Berry Kosmin in 1989 showed:
Other surprises: Buddhist in eight place at $28,500/yr
And Hindus in ninth place $27,800/yr out-earned Catholics, Lutherans, Christian Scientist and Mormons
The poorest groups were:
Black Baptist are the most religious, but were not listed. Money may not always bring happiness. It is easier to be happy with money than without it.
Ralph E. Reed Jr. Head of the Christian Coalition Writes "Apart from Israel, America is the most religious nation in the history of the world."
America has the highest rate of murder, robbery, rape, children having babies out of wedlock, the highest rate of divorce, of people in prison and I could go on and on.
The Bible tells us "A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit; neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. By their fruits ye shall know them."
6 -- Question if religious education improves morality.
Since prayer and religion are so closely united, I believe this study shows that both prayer and religion are detrimental to society. It was commissioned by the "National Catholic Educational Association," funded in part by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. This study covered 16,000 high school seniors from public and non-public high schools nationwide, as reported by Edd Doerr in Catholic Schools: The Facts.
Results of this 1987 study follow:
School Seniors |
Catholic Schools |
Public schools |
Inebriated within |
45% |
39% |
Has tried Cocaine |
21% |
17% |
Had used Marijuana |
57% |
54% |
Smoked Marijuana |
44% |
41% |
Shoplifting in |
40% |
29% |
As Edd Doerr points out, Catholic schools expel "troublemakers." These troublemakers spill over into the public schools. Even so the Catholic schools did not fare well. I understand that Catholic schools have prayer several times daily! It is hard to believe that this study is biased since it was commissioned by the "National Catholic Education Association" and shows Catholic high school seniors to be more immoral than public high school seniors.
Probably the most thorough study of who becomes a criminal, on Catholics Crime and on Religion was done by three Franciscan priests, in 1926, themselves prison chaplains. In a very detailed work, with many tables covering statistics for many years, the authors readily admit that crime among the church members is very prevalent: They wrote "prisoners as a class seem to be the most religious people in the country, or from another angle: The 60 percent of our people who profess no religion are represented by scarcely 10 per cent of our prison population, were as the 40 per cent who profess adherence to religion are represented by close upon ninety per cent of our prison population." That's more evidence! Here is a sample part of one of their charts.
Table #1 Percentage of Catholic prisoners compared to percentage of Catholics in total population, In 1926
Catholic | Catholic | |
Arizona | 33.16% | 53.26% |
Arkansas | 1.21% | 3.14% |
California | 16.83% | 43.61% |
Colorado | 10.91% | 37.42% |
Connecticut | 38.88% | 50.63% |
The list goes on, and on alphabetically to Wyoming in 1926 with similar damaging evidence. The Catholics count everyone who was baptized. The numbers of Catholics in the state are inflated while the number in prison is not. Even with this "hedging" the Catholics were over represented in prison.
In 1955 the British Broadcasting System made a major study of the effects of religion on children. In a three-part series they presented their findings, causing a major public uproar. The BBC reported "Children who went to church on a regular basis have a delinquency rate two to three times that of the population in general." It seems extremely rare to find intelligently irreligious (Humanist) men in prison wrote Havelock Ellis in a book "The Criminal" 1895, based on his studies of criminal behavior. There have been a considerable number of studies showing humanist and atheists are the least likely to go to prison.
7 -- Don't believe in anything that violates the laws of nature.
If you are being told to believe in something that violates the laws of nature, you're being asked to believe in a superstition. All the gods that were believed in by men before 1000 AD are now considered inventions of mans imagination, superstitious beliefs. The evidence is that if man made all the original gods than "man-made God".
The Webster dictionary defines superstition as "1-Belief in supernatural things 2-Reverence founded on fear. -- -
8 -- Question all books be they Bibles, history or science books!
The Bible, and most other religious books, contains numerous examples of low-level moral reasoning, and this makes them poor vehicles for moral development. Consider the popular Sunday school story of David and Goliath. In the tale, David becomes enraged at the taunting challenge Goliath makes to the Israelites. After volunteering to answer the challenge, David brutally kills Goliath and becomes a tribal hero. To the literal understanding of most children and inmates, the story teaches that violence is an appropriate way to resolve conflict and its use will gain you respect among your peers. Inner city youths use the same level of moral reasoning when they commit drive-by shootings against those who have offended them.
9 -- Become as moral as possible and be concerned for the welfare of other now and in the future.
Russians, English, French, German and American psychiatrists got together to collaborate information on Psychopaths. They found that there are three kinds of Psychopaths. Psychopaths are people who appear to have no moral conscious. First there are Psychopaths who rape and kill or are serial killers or steal. Second there are Psychopaths like the generals in the Bosnia Government who kill men, women and children without feelings or Hitler, and Hoss and Stalin who killed Jews. The Russians found a Third kind of Psychopaths by checking a large cross section of the general population. These Psychopaths are quite likely to get promoted in business and industry. They are absolutely loyal to those with more power and join the boss's church, and do everything possible to be with bosses. They treat those below them, their wives and children like dirt. If you have worked for very long at a large business, you have probably worked for or dealt with Psychopaths.
When a Psychopaths is shown a picture of a chair there is only activity in the back of the brain and the electrical activity quickly subsides. When they are shown a picture of a child being beat by a baby setter, their brain has the same activity as when showed the chair. In a normal caring person the brain activity is much longer when the baby is shown being beaten and both the front and back lobes become very active.
Lawrence Kohlberg wrote a book on how moral growth is developmental. It proceeds from a desire to enhance oneself by any means as long as one escapes penalties
(stage I), to a willingness to do for others if there is a clear reciprocation
(stage 2), to a need to conform to peer expectations
(stage 3), to a need to follow the law uncritically
(stage 4), and finally to concern for the rights and humanity of every person that is not bounded by conditions
(stages 5 and 6). At the highest levels, moral judgments must be justified on rational moral grounds rather than by appeal to the order of nature or to religious authority or revelation. Healthy people normally move from one stage to the next, progressing as each stage is understood. Only about 20 percent of the population reaches the levels of stage 5 or 6. Adults who accept the basic doctrines of the Christian faith are less apt to reason at Kohlberg's highest stages. Christianity and other god fearing religions produce Psychopaths by arresting moral development at a very low stage in some individuals. A study he conducted in Turkey found individuals in a strict Muslim community demonstrated no high moral 5 or 6 stage thinking. Freud ([1928] 1949) suggested that religion served to undermine moral responsibility while promoting fanaticism. He contended that people who behave morally only out of fear of a supernatural penalty would be unlikely to respect and care for others from an altruistic perspective.
10 -- Read and understand the Atheist and Humanist Ten Commandments.
Question if the Atheist and humanist commandments are more complete and more likely to produce moral behavior than the Ten Commandments found in the Old Testament. The first four are on honoring god. Should you be honoring your mother and dad if they are raping you, or murderers, or swindlers etc. What about Thou shalt not kill, aren't there exceptions? Should they have listed the exceptions in the bible?
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