Another personal seed of freethought.

In my first post, I wrote about seeds of freethought.  I figure I'd share another today.  I get messages from time to time asking, "Why did you choose to be an atheist?"  To me, this implies that the asker thinks I have some sort of agenda.  A lot of religious people think that atheists choose to be atheist.  I can assure you it really isn't a choice at all.  It's usually a long, arduous process where one analyzes the evidence for and against the existence of a deity and accepts the conclusion the evidence suggests.  That no god/s exist.

Like many other scientists before me (whether they were religious or not) for the past thousand years have used the scientific method by running experiments to test hypotheses.  I remember learning about the scientific method when I was in grade school.  It was nothing extravagant to me at the time, but in my current life its implementation means volumes.

I remember when I was in grade school we had an officer come in and teach the D.A.R.E. program.  There were statistics being thrown at us left and right: mortality rates, rates of use, incarceration rates and so on.

I wondered to myself, "How and where did those numbers come from?"  They could have been just made up to make a point, or there was someone whose job it was to count all the deaths from drugs (which would take a while) each day.  I really couldn't make sense of all the numbers, but once I learned of the internet a couple of years later, I decided to look these numbers up.  I searched a few websites and found the statistics that the officer had talked about.  They were a bit outdated, but they had citations and links to the places involved in doing the studies: and a big one popped out at me, the National Institute of Health.  Apparently, they had doctors and other scientists who did all the work and calculations to generate the numbers presented to me in class.  Also, I could go to the library and find these studies published.  You could say I became the Encyclopedia Brown of drug statistics that day.

Now the part where religion comes in.  Religion as it was presented to me growing up only came with one book: the Bible.  (I don't count the hymnal.)  Here it was presented to me as the "ultimate knowledge", the "guide for life", the "Eternal Word".  So, if all the answers were there then why didn't someone use the Bible to explain the drug statistics or any other answer to a multitude of questions I had as a child.  I still find today religion leaves me with many questions.  If you ask the same question to different sects of any religion you will most likely get different answers from each sect you talk to. (And you'll always hear how everyone else has it wrong.)  If the religion is based on one book, shouldn't everyone's answer who follows that book be the same?  I can go on ad nauseum with questions.

Yet, almost every holy book presented in the world today has not the single thing that would probably convince me to look a little further into the subject.  That one thing is citations.  Those little tidbits that say:  Where did this information come from?  Is that information reliable?  Is the holy book corroborated by any outside sources?  How was this information compiled?   These are questions every religious person should ask about their own holy book and others.  If the holy book is the "ultimate knowledge" then it should stand up to honest inquiry.  When it doesn't even stand up to even the most basic standards of evidence then one should hold it in suspect and not follow blindly.