About this user
I was born an Atheist in Poland, a country ruled from the sidelines, by the Catholic Church and I rejected the improbable and the unlikely by the age of eight.
By the time I was seventeen and living in Australia, I began to assert my own lack of religious and spiritual credulity, adopting the label of a rationalist, a sceptic, a free thinker and an Atheist. I sampled several religions on an academic level, finding each one empty and unsatisfying. For me, truth, knowledge and the pursuit of understanding of the unknown has, does and always will, trump, childish ignorance, based on wishful thinking and fear of my own demise.
The Ten Commandments of Atheist Now
1 - Everything needs to be questioned and re-questioned, knowledge and life are not static.
2 - My life is precious to me and I cherish it but I have no need to feel grateful to anyone for it, I just am. I feel fortunate to be alive thanks to an unintended series of events.
3 - Humans are a social animal, related through DNA to all living things 'on Earth'.
4 - I have no faith or belief, I only 'believe' that which can be verified and re-verified through means other than my own senses.
5 - We are entirely physical beings with the brain acting as our control module.
6 - Death is the end of our physical existence but we live on in the memories of the people that knew us, knew of us and through our DNA.
7 - Good friends and close family make our lives truly rich and are worth more than all material possessions and comforts, imaginable.
8 - Humans invented religions for three key reasons, first was to "explain natural events" that at one time were beyond the human understanding, second was "the denial of human mortality" steaming from our inability to deal with the fear of death and third was to "elevate individuals and organised groups" to positions of authority in given communities, who then invented a false and artificial sense or purpose as the means of control.
9 - Religious faith is accountable for many past and ongoing atrocities and while it doesn't always lead to immoral behaviour, it can do so, and sadly, often does.
10 - I don't have answers to everything and neither does science. We don't know what energy is, we only understand it's characteristics and properties just as as we don't know how life arose on earth for certain nor what caused the big bang or if there was time before time. This doesn't mean this knowledge will be hidden from us forever. In most likelihood a time will come when we will be able understand those things through publicly verifiable processes, not grounded in merely personal experience .
Three thousand years ago everyone was certain that the earth was flat and that we would never understand such things as clouds, tides, wind, volcanoes, solar eclipses, earth quakes, tsunamis, asteroids etc. The lack of an answer to any given question does not entitle that question to an automatic assumption in using god as it's justification. This is called an argument from ignorance.
Age
42
Country
Australia
Occupation
Photographer