Sincere, unprovoked, but still shameless plug.

My friend @Transmillennial, or Kevin Beck, is a fantastic, insightful writer, even if he does talk about sports a lot. 🙂 Last week be began a series of posts on atheism. Here’s a quote from a recent post that I absolutely love. The brief stint of my slightly atheist/agnostic view was based on this idea of God that I clung to so tightly that it became painful, then I began to consider different perspectives and believing in God wasn’t so difficult anymore.

To smite unbelievers, shun your religiously delinquent relatives, cut off the end of your penis, pray for the end of the world, stone gay people, stone adulterers, stone fornicators, stone rebellious children, maim a thief, avoid shellfish, don’t eat with people of different religions, only marry someone of your sect, wives must obey their husbands, you’ll go to hell if you get divorced, you’ll go to hell if you have a glass of wine, you’ll go to hell if you miss a religious gathering, you’ll go to hell if you go swimming, you must undergo certain rituals for God to accept you, you must accept very specific statements about God’s metaphysical make-up, you must believe in an unseen world that has a specific topography, you must speak in a spiritual language, you must anticipate every human standing before God to answer for his/her actions, you must believe in karmic reincarnation, you must believe that dead people will arise from the ground and fly to heaven, you must believe in a postmortem heaven that God will populate exclusively with people who believe and behave properly, you must accept the pronouncements of an institutional hierarchy as absolute truth.

I could go on, but you get the point. I don’t agree with that view, but if that’s what belief in God/Spirit/etc is all about, then I’m an atheist too.