Here are nine good reasons for being godless:

• We created God, not the other way round. Religion was part of humanity's childhood. We understood nothing about the natural world and how it operated, so we created myths. Religion has also played a political role by legitimating authority and keeping the lower orders in their place. And when life isn't much fun because of poverty, miserable toil, war and disease, religion and the afterlife can be quite a consolation.
• There is something wrong and irrational about faith. You should only believe things on the basis of evidence. We don't substitute faith for evidence in other areas of our lives, so why with a belief in God. We would all be outraged if people could be convicted for murder on the basis of gut feelings rather than evidence.
• If God exists, he wants us to be irrational, because he insists on being believed in on the basis of faith rather than providing indisputable evidence of his existence.
• We don't have to worry about God sending us to hell, because there is no afterlife. We know we don't have a soul because when you subtract the physiological aspects of being a human being there is nothing left. The soul would not see, hear, smell or feel because these are the attributes of physical sense organs. The soul would not have thoughts, attitudes, memories or a personality because these require brain cells. The soul would not have emotions either, because they require, among other things, a cerebral cortex, a churned-up stomach, a palpitating heart and sweaty palms. The nothingness of death is already familiar to us. Just think of all those years before we were born.
• Simply by detailing some of God's attributes is enough to make the idea obviously silly. Being all hearing and all seeing, God is receiving an infinite amount of information at any moment of time. He hears every word uttered and sees every action performed. He would understand you regardless of the language you speak. Even if you spoke in uncrackable code he would know what you were saying. And there is nowhere you can hide from him. God is also omnipresent and can intervene everywhere and at any time, although there is no evidence of him actually doing so. Best of all God knows the future. This may be because he plans everything that happens (contrary to everything we have learnt about natural causes over the last few centuries). Or it may be because he has the ability to not only perfectly understand all the causal relationships between an infinite number of different events but also to predict an infinite number of random events for an infinite number of years into the future on billions of stars and planets.
• There is no verifiable evidence of God's intervention in the world. Everything can be explained through natural causes.
• God is a tyrant. He tells us how to live rather than letting us work it out for ourselves. He is Lord and he wants people to submit to him and mindlessly accept his ideas.
• If God exists, then life is meaningless. We are just puppets on a string and this life is just a pre-cursor to the far more important after-life.
• God is simply the god of the ancient Hebrews with no more right to be believed in than the god or gods of other societies and cultures. Religions were always culturally specific because each religion is actually created by a particular culture. So God would be more credible if he had 'revealed' himself separately to more than one people, particularly to people on different continents who had no contact with, or knowledge of, each other. But as we know, that is not what the European missionaries found when they headed off to unknown lands in the sixteenth century.

From The Socialism Web Site - http://home.vicnet.net.au/~dmcm