Rejecting facts
When maintenance of beliefs requires suppression of knowledge.
There are certain things about which many believers feel disbelief.Here are some of them:
- Coincidences can result in the simultaneous occurrence of events, in ways that seem improbable, but are, in fact, possible.
- Many of the teachings offered by religion are invalid. Belief in them has serious, negative repercussions, in numerous situations.
- Many of the events described in religious texts, no matter how widely propagated and repeated, are untrue, uncorroborated, and present a narrow and skewed perspective.
- Regardless of whether the events in the religious texts really occurred or not, their veracity has no bearing on the question of whether the God advocated by the religion exists.
- The frequency and fervency with which religious doctrines are declared does not determine or reveal anything about their level of accuracy.
- One may choose to attribute events to God, to some other fictitious entity, or to nothing at all; this makes no difference to anything other than the beliefs inside one’s head. Only then, when someone acts according to his or her beliefs, does that process of attribution exert indirect effects on the external world.
- Spiritual leaders and fellow believers can be mistaken about the existence of God.
- We do not have a disembodied soul. We will not go to heaven, hell, purgatory, or any realm in the afterlife, neither did we have a previous life.
- Our feeling of consciousness is a phenomenon that comes gradually into existence as our bodies develop, and once we die and our body disintegrates, it will cease to exist.
