I was brought up by a secular father and a mother who likes the idea of god/saints etc but never really went to church or anything.

At school religion was never a topic either, I had one religious friend and she was the odd one out.

Soon after I moved to London, an extremely secular place (apart from the asian immigrant population who segregates themselves from the rest). On TV and politics it seems that everyone is an atheist and all of my friends are too.

Then I arrived in America, and started following more Americans on Twitter, and watched American TV - and I was shocked to discover a world I had only heard about but never experienced.

I always thought religion was reserved for uneducated people who really needed somewhere where they could find hope of a better life. But in America I found some of my peers and people smarter than me who were religious. Very religious! To the point they believed in Adam and Eve and all that!

You see, if I met an old lady in Mexico, who needs to count her pennies to pay for her food, and she was religious, I wouldn’t be surprised nor would I argue about the existence of God with her. I think she is probably better off believing that there’s someone looking after her and that her suffering will stop once she goes to the after life. But smart affluent people? Programmers who work with logic all day long? How can that be?

Here are some of the main things that I don’t understand.

  1. If everything must have been created, then who created God? Does he have a mom and dad? Where does he come from? Is he a he? Does he have a penis? Where does he live? What is he made of? Were did he learn all that he knows?
  2. Seeing as there are hundreds of religions in the world, what makes you think that yours is the correct one? Why weren’t the greeks right? Or the egyptians? How do you view their religions? Do you think they are stupid for believing in multiple Gods who are often shaped like non-human animals? Are they stupid for believing the world was created differently to what you believe in? And have you stopped to think why you believe in what you believe? I’d argue 99.9% of people follow the religion most common in their region, the one that their parents also believed in. Had you been born in Iraq you would likely be a Muslim, had you been born in ancient Greece you’d likely be a polytheist.
  3. If religious books are to be believed - why does it have no mentions of the Dinosaurs at all? Or the other beings before them. They lived for much much longer than any of us - so I believe the Bible should have been dedicated at least 4 / 5 of it to them. And how about the future life forms that we may one day encounter living in a different planet, why are those not mentioned in the all-knowing bible? Could it perhaps be because the humans who made up the Bible didn’t yet know about the existence of fossils and extraterrestrials and therefore had no reason to come up with an explanation for them?
  4. Which brings me to another question. What if one day you discover, without shadow of a doubt, that the Bible in its entirety was completely made up by a bunch of guys who wanted to control a population under their terms so that they could make more profit from their businesses or even by stealing from the poor? In other words, how can you be so sure that the words you read on that book are those of an almighty being and not just another human?
  5. Why doesn’t God speak and why is he invisible? What’s the big deal with showing himself? What’s with all the mysteriousness? It seems totally counter productive to me.
  6. Why would he answer to your prayers to win a football match or even get a better job when he clearly does not even do anything about the billions who starve and billions more individual non-humans who are tortured at the hands of his creation? Could we agree that if he does exist he really is just watching but not doing anything at all?
  7. If he’s so freaking smart, then why do men have nipples?

Honestly I could go on and on with questions but those are the most obvious ones which basically points any logical person to the conclusion that God was invented by humans in an attempt to explain the mysteries of life before they could actually study them. Just like today we tell fairytales to our children to help them understand life in a more basic way.