Classic

[Rahul]

All is not right. There's still plenty of room for improvement. Being godless would be a major improvement for everybody, everywhere.

What good has been done in the name of your God to make up for four thousand years of corpses and ruined lives produced by his believers following a scripture which gave them more than enough reasons to justify killing, looting, raping and stealing land?

Very true.

I'd like to expand on this. I'll quote "No matter what there will always be evil people doing evil things and good people doing good things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."

That's a fact. Good people can and do, every day, justify doing evil things because of their religion.

You drop the religion excuse and you have to own up to yourself if you treat anyone evil. You have to admiit to yourself, "Yeah, I'm an evil fuck".

You can't go kill someone minding their own business and rationalize, "Well I did what god wanted me to do. That person wasn't obeying what god said so I am somehow justified in committing that horror. So I'm a good person." You can't vote against allowing gay couples equal rights for the benefits of marriage because, "Well the bible says that's wrong. They are living in sin. So I'm not denying equal rights, I'm upholding gods laws."

Less religion, less evil acts.

I'm a firm believer that humans, despite all the evil crap individuals and groups have done throughout our species' history, are basically good.

We're social animals. If we were basically evil, we wouldn't survive as a social species. We wouldn't even survive at all. If humans were loners socially like a lot of animals are we'd be outclassed and summarily wiped out in a few, short generations.

But we do. That's why lions and hyenas didn't kick our butts on the Serengeti Plains 200,000 years ago. One on one, back then, a human versus a lion? Human looses 99.9999% of the time. Somehow, though, we are the species overpopulating the planet while Lions are becoming an endangered species.

No more easy outs.

Religion is the number one easy out. Patriotism is number two.

Time to start taking responsibility for our own actions. And by that I mean on an individual basis without subverting your responsibility for your individual actions based on some higher authority you are supposedly serving.

I'm not taking any easy outs. Whenever I'm a prick, or do something that harms anyone, regardless of whether I agree with them, or their life decisions, that's MY FAULT. That's MY FAILING. That's me being a complete idiot and I need to be slapped. I'm not going to justify it saying, "I think their life choices are gross but so does the majority of my society so it's ok I treated them that way."

No, it's not ok. That's just me epically failing as a supposedly decent human.