What most everyone else has said - with one or two notable exceptions - but I'd just like to add this.
Would you, for instance, buy a car (or a loaf of bread, or whatever you like) from someone who threatened you with unimaginably outrageous amounts of harm if you don't instantly part with your cash? Because that's all that religion has in their armoury. Believe or burn. Once you come to realise that threatening you is all they can do because their position is just that weak and pathetic, you'll know you can simply turn your back and walk away.
I'll illustrate further. You'd better start believing in invisible pink unicorns right now, because if you don't, the Queen of the unicorn union will visit you while you sleep and stomp all over you. Not very convincing, is it? "If you don't believe in this thing that I do, then I believe that something pertaining to the thing you don't believe will get you! Won't you be sorry!"
Would you, for instance, buy a car (or a loaf of bread, or whatever you like) from someone who threatened you with unimaginably outrageous amounts of harm if you don't instantly part with your cash? Because that's all that religion has in their armoury. Believe or burn. Once you come to realise that threatening you is all they can do because their position is just that weak and pathetic, you'll know you can simply turn your back and walk away.
I'll illustrate further. You'd better start believing in invisible pink unicorns right now, because if you don't, the Queen of the unicorn union will visit you while you sleep and stomp all over you. Not very convincing, is it? "If you don't believe in this thing that I do, then I believe that something pertaining to the thing you don't believe will get you! Won't you be sorry!"
At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist. This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways - with relief or with despair. Only Skagra responded to it by thinking, 'Wait a second. That means there's a situation vacant.'
