Lazy May

May came and went surprisingly fast. I fell into a lazy slump this month, although I'm not sure why. That's why I haven't been writing any posts. I spent most of my time reading and consuming various media. I need to return to being productive though and I hope to resume that tomorrow.

One part of my life that I was not lazy about was my training. Yup, its triathlon season again and I'm glad its here. I'm training on my own this year. It can be difficult to motivate myself some days and I don't really have much of a training plan. I just try to get in a good amount of running, cycling, and swimming every week. I usually adjust my workouts each day according to how I feel. If I feel good, I'll do a little more and push a little harder. If I feel bad, I'll cut the workout I had thought about doing by as much as 50%, change to another discipline, or even just decide to take the day off. So far its been working out pretty well. I've remained injury free since March and I'm faster in running and swimming this year than last. I'll be focusing on cycling a lot more this month because its my greatest weakness right now.

Last Monday I did my first triathlon race of the season, CapTexTri. Last year this was also the first triathlon race that I ever did, so it was a nice way to celebrate my "triathlete anniversary". The race went pretty well, as I expected it too. I did the sprint distance (750m swim, 20km bike, 5km run), the same distance I did last year. I chose to do the sprint instead of the olympic distance because I didn't feel my training had quite prepared me well enough for that distance and I had a few different injuries and illnesses that had affected my training in the last few weeks. I also won my age division last year and I was hoping to defend my title and repeat that performance.

After the race started, I was confused during the swim portion of the race because I thought I had become a much better swimmer, but I found myself unable to catch many people in my swim wave. Last year I was first out of the water and during the race I thought I was around 10th place (I was actually 6th I later discovered). That hurt my confidence right from the beginning. The bike portion was okay, but I knew I should be going faster. I just haven't been developing the right muscle groups enough. I got passed by fewer than 10 people on the bike. Coming off the bike into transition I was neck and neck with another guy in my age group. As we started the run, he bolted out and was running hard. I was having difficulty shifting gears and I tried to minimize the gap between us. After the first mile my legs finally came around and I settled into a good pace. I eventually overtook that guy in another half mile (I talked to him afterwards and learned that he cramped up). I felt really good on the run, almost to the point where I felt like I wanted to do another lap and make the run a 10K instead of a 5K. I picked up the pace as the finish came in sight and sprinted in the final chute, and some guy next to me followed up and we pushed each other in. Less than a minute after finishing I threw up (gee, that's twice this year out of three races I've done), but I felt great.

My total time was 1:14:48, almost 5 minutes faster than my time last year of 1:19:27. So I was very pleased about that, although I was hoping to break 1:10 this race. I have a lot of room to grow on the bike and if I can do that, then it shouldn't be too difficult to do. The disappointment came when I looked through the results and found that I placed 4th in my age group, just one place short of a podium finish and an award. That kind of sucks because part of the reason I did the sprint distance was I wanted to get another trophy this year. It just goes to show how much more competitive my age group was this year. My time last year would have earned me a sobbering 13th place this year.

Here's a link to the results of my age group: Race Results
Here's some pictures from this race and others I've done so far this year: Facebook Album


Well that's all I have to share for now. Staring tomorrow I'm going to get my butt back in gear and being productive with my time, which will include more posts here. I have a couple of book reviews to share as well so look forward to that.

The Crazy Things People Will Do For Their God

I've been reading posts on the Atheist Experience blog for the past couple of months now. There is one that Tracie (one of the hosts on the show) made a few weeks ago that I wanted to share and comment on.

Is Religion Beneficial to Society?

Tracie's post analyzes the thought process of religious believers who are willing to personal commit or condone atrocities such as genocide, murdering their own child, etc. if their god commands it. This is something that resonated strongly with me because, if you recall, my religious friend said she was perfectly willing to go into an elementary school and murder all the children there if her god commanded her to. It totally shocked me that she said this, and it still does. Below are some selected quotes from that post that I think are worth emphasizing, but really I recommend that you read the entire article.

And I would follow that section with all the letters we get from adherents telling us that their religion is good, who after a few exchanges say that mass genocide, mass infanticide, suicide-mass-murder, rape, slavery and child sacrifice are all morally acceptable if, and only if, a god tells you to do these things.

Religion can take a human being who is willing to condemn an action as immoral in a particular circumstance, and get them to say that same action is moral in that same circumstance, if a god says to do it.

Someone might want revenge on Hitler to the point of hoping for a merciless, vengeful eternity of torture. But an average child? Or even an average adult? It’s hard to believe anyone would say that any of our friends and neighbors should be deserving of torture for ten minutes, let alone eternity?

There is something unnerving about living in a society where the predominant religion is one that can make a standard, normal human assert that atrocities should never be committed—except when god says to commit them.

There are many interesting comments to this article as well. I made some comments of my own there and talked about my religious friend, her willingness to commit murder for her god, and her response to my question of how is she different than a jihadist. (Her answer was "they're not really talking to god"). Here are some good responses I got to that from other comment writers.

cipher:
The sad thing is that Tyler's friend could easily have said, "If I heard the voice of God telling me to murder children, I'd assume that I was losing my mind" - but that wouldn't occur to most of them. It seems more reasonable to them to say, "Why, yes, I'd murder children."

tracieh:
Actually they do say things like “god would never say that.” But it's just too easy to point to all the times their god is described to have had people do these things in their own Bibles. Then you say, “You mean this god?”

tracieh:
I agree that it is unbelievable to see that they will say it outright--sometimes without a moment's hesitation. But god is always right—so killing children becomes right if god says to do it. That’s how "god" works in people's heads.

tracieh:
She’d "really" be killing for _god_, but they are killing because they’re deluded about what they think god is (i.e., their god isn't the "real" god). So, they’re not justified. It’s only justified if you do it for the "real" god. And since her religion is the "real" one and theirs is "false"—they’d be terrorists, and she’d be a martyr. Funny, though, how that works both ways, right?

I really, really wish I could ask my religious friend to read this post and all of the comments. If she ever agrees to talk to me about her faith again (although I doubt she will) this is going to be one of the first things I want her to read along with my earlier post about belief in hell.

Reasons for Resignation

Last Friday, April 10th, was my final day of work at National Instruments. I was overwhelmed with a bittersweet feeling in those final two weeks. I still think its a great company and a wonderful place to work. Above all else, I really like all of the people I met and worked with there. It was very difficult for me to make the decision to leave because of that. I was employed at that company for only 18 months, from October 2007 to April 2009. I'm going to address everything that led up to my decision to leave and the reasons why I ultimately did leave. First I'll start with an outline of my job history including why I took the job in the first place, then I'll explain what factors caused me to leave


History

Pre-Employment
I had interviews with three different groups at NI. After those interviews I was asked to rank them in order of my preference. I ranked the Instrument Control Software group as my number one choice and eventually that's the group that I ended up working in. I chose them because they did device driver development, an area of computer engineering that I was not very familiar with. At that time I wanted to do something new to explore my interests and see if it was something that I liked doing. Plus I had been working on Allacrost so much at the time that I really didn't want to do even more application development than I was already doing.

Oct 2007 - Nov 2007: Training
My first two months or so were all training, which was fine. I was pretty shocked when I first learned that I'd spend an entire eight consecutive weeks in training before I'd even start working. The training itself was fine, although later I came to realize that very little of what I learned in training applied to my job. Only about one quarter of the time I spent in training was useful to me at my position, but the training I was enrolled in was directed toward applications engineers (a form of tech support). It wasn't particularly well suited for a research and development engineer like myself in my opinion.

Dec 2007 - April 2008: Application Development
When my real work first started I learned that I would be the only engineer in my group that would be working on VXI for the time being, which had me a little concerned. My first assignment was addressing problems in an internal automated test suite for our VXI driver. The primary issue was that it didn't work on systems with hyper-threading or multiple CPUs and we were developing a new embedded controller (VXIpc-882) with a dual-core processor. The code itself was almost as old as I was (over 20 years) and we even had to use a very old operating system (Windows 3.11) and version of our software to perform this test. The test was very cumbersome to setup and user error was a common occurrence, while error reporting mechanisms were nearly non-existant. The code reflected the state of the application. It was poorly written, poorly documented, and poorly designed. My job was to re-write this application with a proper design, utilizing proper synchronization mechanisms, provide the user with a better interface, and better documentation and error reporting. Working with/rewriting old software was not a foreign experience to me and I was content for the time being. However, I had joined this team with the expectation of working with others and learning driver development. Almost six months into the job I still had virtually no exposure to any of this. I told myself to be patient and that it would get better soon.

May 2008 - Oct 2008: Testing
The next several months were testing. Testing, testing, testing, and testing again. I did nothing but run tests and analyze problems that occurred during those tests. This period was very annoying because it was so tedious and unchallenging. Someone with only a high school diploma could have done my job during this period of time. I found the work almost insulting when it caused me to ask myself "I struggled through 2.5 years of grad school for this?". Even more frustrating were the actions we took when a test failed. Instead of fixing the problem or even finding the exact source of the problem in some cases, we'd either run the test again and hope that it worked, or I would be asked to add a hack to the test application that I wrote to circumvent the problem. I voiced my strong opposition to this policy on more than one occasion. Because the VXI team was so small (it was mostly me) and fixing each problem could take weeks or months for one bug resolution, the replies that I received were "we agree with you, but we don't have the resources to do that". I understand of course, but that still didn't make me like the situation that I found myself in. I anxiously awaited the end of this testing and the new release of our driver software. Once again, I told myself to be patient and to expect things to get better.

Nov 2008 - Jan 2009: Research
After we released the new version of our driver, I finally got to do something related to driver work. I investigated potential problems and solutions in providing a new feature for one of our existing products. This too, though, was a disappointment. First I leveraged a similar but unrelated software product our code produced and was told the changes to make to get it to work for our product. Then it was a matter of me reading through Microsoft's documention (sometimes acceptable, sometimes incomplete, and sometime hidious) to find the answer to "Can we do X?" or "How does Y function?". I produced a prototype solution as a proof-of-concept that was the only highlight of this otherwise uinteresting work.

During this peroid of time, I also came to learn just how badly written our driver software was. The code did not conform to any standard, there was very little documentation, and the design principles it employed were downright blaspemous. I've never seen the concept of inheritance applied in such a disasterious manner. I was totally ready to dive in and begin fixing it. It needed to be re-written from scratch just as the test application I had worked on was. But to do this all by myself with no driver development experience and little help from the existing code base would have taken me years. The company wasn't willing to invest additional resources to truly fix the root of the problem. A good analogy would be applying bandaids and ice packs to a man with broken bones and internal bleeding. That's what the company wished to continue doing, and from a business perspective it makes sense because additional investment in this area isn't likely to produce a profit. But knowing that didn't make me like my situation any better.

Feb 2009 - Apr 2009: Vista Support
The next few months after that I worked on making our software compatible with Windows Vista. Sometimes the work was bearable, but overall it was just frustrating. I still wasn't doing anything related to driver development, and by this point I didn't want to anymore. Any "driver development" in VXI I understood to be just fixing a bug in a really bad mess of code. Even looking through the code was extremely frustrating because it made no sense at all and the nonsense was never explained anywhere. My tech lead explained to me that the only good way to fix a bug in this driver was to walk through the code with a debugger and look at the call stack to figure out what was going on because it was such a tangled mess of spagetti that you couldn't understand it just by looking at it. I tried looking at it anyway and found that he was absolutely correct. I also learned that VXI software development was being moved to our Shanghai office by the year's end (read: my job was being outsourced). That provided me with some relief knowing I wouldn't be stuck doing this for much longer. But still there really wasn't anything in my group that I thought was interesting and would enjoy doing. During my final few months my manager also let me spend 50% of my time on a research project with another group to see if that would be something that I would enjoy. I found it interesting, but it wasn't something that I would have liked to do on a permanent basis.


The Decision
Ultimately, these are the factors that forced me to consider leaving my job.

• I was working by myself most of the time
• My job was often intellectually unchallenging for me
• The majority of my responsibilities were supporting a legacy product
• I didn't find my work interesting

The final point was what put the last nail in the coffin for me. Its somewhat ironic, because at my last job at Freescale, I hated the company but loved my work. Then with National Instruments, I loved the company but hated my work. This position helped me realize how important it was for me to enjoy what I was doing at my job.

I started thinking about leaving around November last year and made my resume public to see if any good job positions came my way. In early January, I revealed to my manager that I was considering quitting and that I had already started looking for another job. My manager made a great effort and addressing what he could of these issues after I shared them with him. He suggested that I talk to some other groups in the company to see if I would be interested in their line of work. I did talk with a few other groups earlier this year, but unfortunately due to the hard economic times no one had an opening. As the disappointing days of work dragged on, it remained unknown when I would be able to do an internal transfer to a different position or when another exciting job opportunity would come my way.

During each "phase" of my employment I often thought like this: "I don't like what I'm doing right now, but if I am patient it will be finished and I'll move on to something better". Its ironic because when talking with my boss' boss about my job concerns during my final weeks, he pointed out that VXI software was moving to Shanghai and that things would get better. But that knowledge wasn't enough for me. I was sick of waiting around hoping things would get better instead of being able to take action and make the situation better myself. And that is what ultimately lead me to resign, even though I did not have another position lined up. Life is too short to spend it doing something you don't like.


Next Time
Now that I have much more free time you can expect that I'll be blogging more regularly. Next time I'll talk about what my plan is for employment/income and what type of job I am looking for. To highlight the goal of finding work that is interesting, I'm planning a retrospective analysis of my interests as they have changed over a period of time. I also have a lot more to talk about regarding religion. In fact I'm only half way through that set of video clips I've been sharing. So look forward to all of that.

A New Direction

I'm taking a break from my religion/science blogging this post to talk about life. Actually I've been wondering lately if I should start a new blog dedicated to the topic of religion since I write about it so much lately. Right now I don't think I will, but if the readers of this blog tell me that they are only interested in a specific topic that could influence me to do so.

Anyway, other than my studies on religion and science there isn't a whole lot for me to comment on right now. Sadly I admit that my time spent on Allacrost has fell to almost nothing. An upgrade cycle I did back in February somehow rendered my Linux images unbootable and I haven't had the time and motivation to fix that yet, so that's a major contributing factor. I hope to get it fixed in a couple weeks and slowly get back into the swing of things, but I realize now that I have other interests and hobbies outside of Allacrost and I don't think its feasible for me to dedicate myself to that project at the level that I did for so many years. I'll continue working on it until the final release or until my death, whichever comes first. :)

I've been struggling to get back into good shape for triathlon season. I've mostly been focusing on my running now that I have custom orthotics and shin splints don't seem to be a problem at all for me anymore (YAY). But I've been plagued with some sort of problem in my throat for nearly two months that has left me with a chronic cough. The doctor said he thought it was a bacterial infection and the medicines he prescribed worked great, but as soon as they ran out it came back. I coughed so hard that I actually damaged my ribcage and its pretty painful. So the coughing and damaged ribs really hindered my training in a big way. So I wasn't in top shape for the Capital 10K race which I ran last Sunday. It was disappointing because I had been looking forward to that race for an entire year.

That race last Sunday, by the way, was the one year anniversary of my return to competitive athletics. The race itself went better than I expected to and I actually beat my time last year by a little over a minute. I finished at 40:59.4, which is 6:36/mile pace. I think the reason I did so well was because I ran it smart, conserved my energy, and ran negative splits (last year I ran the first half of the race too fast and died in the last half). I didn't take my splits, but I know my first mile was 6:50 so that means I definitely sped up as the race went on. As I was on the final stretch, I knew the 41:00 mark was coming up and I wanted to beat it, so I sprinted as hard as I could for about 10 or 15 seconds. And then about 20-30 seconds after I finished, I threw up. And I mean I really puked my guts out. I threw up at three different places in the finish area (all off to the side). It felt good because I know when that happens, it means I really pushed myself beyond my body's limit. I haven't done a post-race puking since my last race in high school in early 2000, where I ran the 2-mile race at the regional track meet in a personal best of 10:24 (I think I PRed that race by 12-20 seconds).

And now an important announcement. I've decided to leave my current job. In this economy I know its a bit crazy to do that, but I am financially stable and I feel confident enough to make this move. The reason I decided to do this was largely because I'm not interested in the work I'm doing there. It was a really hard decision to make because I love the company and the people, but I'm still pretty miserable when I have to spend 40 hours a week doing something that I don't enjoy and that is not intellectually challenging for me. My manager (who has been totally awesome about this) helped me try to find other work in the company to see if there was another group I could transfer to where I could find my niche, but even after looking around and working temporarily with another group it just wasn't happening. My last day is April 10th (next Friday).

So what do I do now? Well I don't have anything lined up yet, even though I've kept my resume posted for the past four months or so. I've been keeping an eye out but I just didn't find anything that really fit my interests and my preferred technologies. I really want to go back to a Linux development environment. I hate dealing with Microsoft, Windows, and all of their crap. Sadly, the best positions that I have found that meet what I'm looking for have been with defence contract agencies. I'm a bit apprehensive about designing "tools of war", but I've decided that if another defence opportunity presents itself to me, I might as well interview and see what happens. I'd prefer that the results of my work go to the betterment of life, not the destruction of it (I know that defence is a necessary industry and war/conflict is unavoidable, but I would like to avoid having a part in it if I can). I'd really like to work for a research lab or institution and help design software to enable scientists and engineers to better do their jobs. That way, I can also learn about another field. I would really love to be able to design simulators. Biological, chemical, structural, electrical, any kind of simulator really.

But I'm not limiting myself to just a typical job either. I had dinner with my friend Hari a few weeks ago and he actually proposed that I try out working for myself as an iphone game developer. Apparently there's a lot of money in that if you develop a popular game. It sounds simple enough and I think I'm easily capable of doing that work on my own, so I think I'm likely to look into it and give it a shot. If I can make a living that way, be my own boss, and not have to put a ton of time into it, I think that would be great. I could spend more time and effort dedicated to causes that I care about that way. I've also considered going back to school to get my PhD, either in computer engineering or possibly in another field like neuroscience or psychics. My primary concern with returning to grad school life though is how much time working on my PhD will consume. If you recall some of my posts from my grad school days, they were not happy times for me. I got physically and mentally sick from working myself to the bone every day without respite. I started a thread on the PhD comics forum asking about time commiments in different majors.

I'm also open to the idea of moving away from Austin if the right school or job opportunity presents itself to me. I love Austin a lot and it is difficult for me to part with it, but a part of me feels like I should not stay in place for too long. I need to shake things up every few years and intentionally put myself in a new environment where I am not comfortable. I don't want to live in a bubble called Austin, or anything else, for the rest of my adult life. I've been considering California or perhaps somewhere in Europe, perhaps Germany. I don't know German but its a language that I would like to learn one day. I could try Japan too, but I don't know if that country would be a good fit for me to live in. I'll visit it someday to be sure, but living there is another matter entirely.

Anyway that's my life for now. Hopefully my life will become more interesting as I leave my current job and I'll provide more frequenent updates on happenings in the near future.

I believe you're going to hell...and I hope I'm wrong.

I've been thinking about the concept of hell a lot lately. I would like for you to think about it too, especially if you are a believer in some form of hell. First lets take a brief look at what hell is, at least in general without getting too far into specifics or different religious explanations.

What is hell?
Hell is a place that human "souls" go to after their mortal life on Earth ends. No other species on Earth, at least according to most mainstream monotheistic religions, is at risk of going there.

What happens in hell?
You are subjected to the ultimate form of torture. Your "soul body" will burn in a lake of fire. You will be tortured and mutilated and suffer the most unimaginable suffering from the moment you die for all eternity. There will not exist a single moment of respite from this continuous torment.

What factors determine whether or not I will go to hell?
It varies according to which belief system you adhere too. But according to my religious friend, you can go to hell for either of these two conditions. (1) You do not accept Jesus Christ as your personal lord and savior (ie, you are not a Christian). (2) God will judge your life and if you did not "follow his rules" as he outlines in the bible well enough, then he damns you to hell. Muslims, from what I know, believe all non-Muslims go to hell but I'm not sure if any other conditions apply.

Once I'm in hell, how do I get out or make my situation any better?
You can do nothing to change your fate after you die. Once you're in hell, you will stay there for all eternity. God will not forgive you and will not show a single ounce of mercy for you no matter who you are, no matter how apologetic you are, and no matter how much you are suffering and crying out in pain asking for mercy. He will allow it to continue. Forever.

Where did hell come from?
Like all things, God made the decision to create it. He deemed the existence of hell, of eternal torture, a necessary and just thing.

How many people living today are destined to go to hell?

Let's provide an estimate how many people are going to go to hell, shall we? Well, the answer of course depends on which religion is correct. (Most) Christians say that all non-Christians are going to hell while (most) Muslims say that all non-Muslims are going to hell. For the sake of keeping this short, we will consider just these two religions. Also because I'm not God and can't judge whether someone is a "proper" Christian or Muslim and doesn't deserve hell, I'll just say for the sake of argument that 100% of persons of the correct faith are not going to hell. I'm also going to ignore denominations and just assume that both Catholic and Protestant, Shiite and Sunni, etc. are all not going to hell (even though many of these denominations believe that this is not true). So lets take a look here. The graph below is from adherents.com and lists an estimated distribution of the world based on religion.



Now according to cia.gov, the human population of the world is somewhere in the ballpark of 6,706,993,152 people, or 6.7 billion. As a comparison, the population of the United States is approximately 307,212,123 people, or 0.307 billion people. The US population accounts for 4.58% of the current world population.

If the 66% of the population that is non-Christian world is damned to hell, that's 4,426,615,480 people, or 4.4 billion. 4.4 billion people are deserving of eternal torture and punishment according to mainstream Christian belief. And if we assume that Allah is the one true God instead of the Christian one, looking at the 79% of the non-Muslim world we have 5,298,524,590 or 5.3 billion on the verge of eternal damnation. To put that in perspective, if the Christian teachings are true then a quantity of people that is over 14.4 times that of the current population of the United States is deserving of the worst suffering imaginable, forever (the number of non-Muslim damned is 17.2 times).

Holy crap!!! I thought your god was supposed to be a loving and merciful character? How is it that so many people sing praise to Jesus (who is God) or Allah and say nothing but wonderful things about them when they surely realize that of the number of people who are currently living on this Earth, he is sending 4.4 b-i-l-l-i-o-n of them to be tortured for eternity simply because they don't believe in him? I am having trouble finding the correct ways to express the seriousness of this. Lets think about the horrors of the Holocaust in Nazi Germany. About 2.2 billion people on Earth believe that the other 4.4 billion deserve a punishment that is far, far, far, FAR worse than what those poor, innocent Jewish and other minority victims suffered. Furthermore they deserve to suffer in that state for all eternity without a shred of hope for temporary respite, not even being allowed a second death. If Jesus is justified in torturing those who are "inferior" for not believing in him, why don't I ever hear Christians making the claim that Adolf Hitler was justified in his actions during the Holocaust? Is the only difference because Jesus is a God while Hitler was merely a man? Does that mean that there is a different set of morals and justified actions for a God than a man? If God is justified in everything that He does, does that imply that the more powerful or knowledgeable a being is, the more correct their seemingly unethical actions would be?

I know that what I am about to say may cause a lot of Christians, Muslims, and people of other faiths to become furious but I will say it anyway. If the god (Jesus, Allah, Yahweh) in your religion is going to send all non-believers of your faith to be tortured for eternity without respite, then your god is much worse than Adolf Hitler. And much worse than Joseph Stalin. And much worse than Mao Zedong. Your god is much worse than all three of those genocidal mass murderers combined. I would love if someone could explain this and convince me why I am incorrect about what I just said.

Coping with a belief of hell

Why do people continue to hold on to the beliefs that all others who do not share their faith are going to be damned with eternal torture? Isn't it distressing to them? I haven't met all 4.4 billion people of the non-Christians nor have I met all 5.3 billion people that are non-Muslims, but I am willing to wager that a large majority of them are good, decent people and I'm sure that nearly everyone would agree with me on that. If I personally held that belief that those people deserve to be tortured, I would be devastated! I generally care about other people, including those that I've never met. My mission in life is to do what I can to make the world a better place for both the people living on this Earth now and for those who will live long after I am dead (and burning in hell?). I think I can understand better now those people of faith who make it their mission to convert as many people over to their belief system as possible, so long as they are doing so because they genuinely believe that these (innocent?) people would otherwise be tortured by their "loving" god (add sarcasm). But not all missionaries have that sort of altruistic intention in mind I'm sure.

I also think I now have a better understanding of the grief that must exist in a religious family when a close friend or family member rejects the teachings that they have shared. I grow more thankful every day that I did not grow up in such a family, because I know it would be so much harder for me to be who I am. Having become close friends with a religious person was hard enough on me. When she told me that she believed that I was going to hell, despite having nothing but positive things to say about me at that time, it really did hurt. And it was also very confusing and difficult for me to accept. How does she cope with that belief if she cares about me? How does she also respect my right to believe or not believe what I choose and not try to actively convert me? (I'm glad that she doesn't try that by the way). Is it just something that she doesn't think about? Does she avoid becoming emotionally attached to any person who she believes is going to hell? I wish I could ask her these things.

Is hell something that people deserve?

Whether my religious friend or another person believes that I and X billion number of other humans on the planet are going to suffer from a state of eternal torture upon death is one matter. I think that a question that many believers fail to ask themselves (and should) is "Do these people deserve that?". Lets examine three possible responses.

"Yes, I believe you deserve to go to hell for not sharing my belief."
Well then I wonder how your position is any different from Hitler, as incendiary as that may sound. Hitler believed that all Jews and other groups should be thrown in concentration camps, starved, beaten, and murdered en masse. You believe that all non-Christians/non-Muslims/etc. should be thrown in a lake of fire, tortured, mutilated, and tormented for all eternity. You both believe that certain groups of people deserve this inhumane, unimaginable level of punishment and suffering.

"I don't know, that's God's will."
But you still believe that these people will go to hell, right? So obviously your god thinks that they deserve to go to hell. And because your god is infinitely more powerful, more knowledgeable, and more benevolent than you (really?), you are just willing to default to his/her/its decision and respond "Yeah, that's cool with me". Personally, in some ways I find this answer to be almost more insulting than just saying yes. Perhaps you feel guilty, so you want to avoid the question and shift the blame to your god. After all, this is his judgment, right? Have you ever considered questioning his judgment? Have you ever considered saying to your god "Hey, I disagree with you torturing these billions and billions of people for eternity and I think you should stop"? If you haven't, then why the hell not?

"No, I don't think that you deserve that simply for not sharing my faith."
Great! You are more moral than the god that you worship. You are not alone either, because most human beings are as well. I know that if I was a god, I sure wouldn't be putting these people through so much suffering for not believing in me. Especially if I was the sort of god that wanted people to believe in me based on "faith", or belief without evidence.

I believe that you are going to hell, and I hope that I am wrong about that.

Everything I've said builds to this final pressing question that I've been pondering for the past week. If people genuinely hold this belief about hell, why do I never hear anyone say "I believe that you are going to hell, and I hope that I am wrong about that"? Do they really want to be correct that 4.4 billion or 5.3 billion of their fellow human inhabitants of Earth are going to hell, to be greeted by the screams of the billions more already there and to be followed by the trillions who will die later? I have been told that I am going to hell countless times throughout my life, yet not one person has expressed any sort of remorse about that belief. They've never told me that they wished that particular belief that they held was not true. Does that mean that they want it to be true?


I'd guess "probably not", at least for most decent and caring human beings. So why don't they abandon it? Why is religion this "all or none" deal to so many people? Can you not continue to believe in God while rejecting the belief in hell? Can you not believe in a heaven if you do not believe in a hell? Many people have already rejected many aspects of their belief system, whether they realize it or not. I have yet to meet a Christian who adheres to Deuteronomy 21:18-21, which states that you should stone your unruly children to death. (I've also yet to meet a person who does not admit that they were not unruly at some point during their childhood). I could list dozens, perhaps hundreds of examples like this that you would reject, I promise you.


If from the bottom of your heart of hearts you believe that I am going to hell, that will always make me sad. Even more so if you are a beloved person to me. But I hope that you'll at least have given the idea of hell some thought. And maybe, just maybe, you'll say to me one day "I believe that you are going to hell...and I hope that I am wrong".

On the Historical Veracity of Jesus

The historical veracity behind Christianity (or any religion) could be an entire book and I suspect that I will write more posts questioning the historical evidence for events described in the bible. But for now I'll share this video clip form my on going series.



The caller is rather annoying and close minded in my opinion. He repeatedly asserts that the bible is more than just a book, asserts that his religion is a fact, asserts that all other religions are false, asserts that the hosts are going to hell, and providers zero evidence to back up that his assertions are facts. He just does not get it. I like what Don (the host on the left) says towards the end: "If you are going to make an extraordinary claim, you need to have extraordinary evidence to back that up". I couldn't agree more. When I'm told that there was a man who lived 2,000 years ago who could walk on water, cure any ailment instantly without even touching the patient, was resurrected and rose many others from the dead for a fun zombie get-together in town. Sorry if I'm skeptical of all that when the only place it is written is within the bible.


I'm not saying that a man named Jesus Christ never existed. I'm skeptical about whether he did exist, but he may have. Or his character may have been based off of another real person of that time, and that person may have indeed claimed to be the son of God and was crucified. From what I have studied, many people during those times (and even many people today) claimed to be the Messiah. I'm much much more skeptical that he was the son of God and had all of these supernatural abilities, especially when I can't find any mention of these miracles outside of the bible or other religious writings. The bible repeatedly says "Jesus performed miracle X, and word spread throughout the countryside about his deed". Do you really think that if someone had cured a blind man that no one would have written about it? That no historical scholar would have gotten word about it and rushed to see it for himself?


I haven't done a comprehensive study on the historicity of Jesus (yet), but I did find this page on GotQuestions.org: Historical Evidence of Jesus Christ. The give a number of secular sources there that they claim support that Jesus existed. I haven't looked at these sources myself yet, but I hope to get around to it eventually and make up my own mind. Re-read that last sentence. Rather than continuing to believe what I always have, I am open to looking at evidence that may contradict my lack of belief. How many Christians or religious people would honestly do that? How many care enough about whether their beliefs are true or not to do that? Not many from my experience. I think the approach I am taking is the best one to find out what is true and what is not. And that's what I care about. I want to believe what I think is most likely to be true, not what I most wish or hope to be true (and by the way, I don't particularly wish or hope that no Gods exist).


One of the things that the GotQuestions page mentions is the sacking of the temple of Jerusalem and Israel by the Romans in 70 AD (which did in fact happen). They hypothesize that much of the evidence and many of the eye witnesses of Jesus were killed during this time. Do you really think that every single one of the thousands of witnesses to Jesus were slaughtered in this attack? Ancient Israel is a large area of the middle east, especially in those times when transportation was much slower. And there were nearly four decades that had passed since Jesus' death. If there was sufficient evidence, sure much of it may have been destroyed in that attack, but I find it near improbable to claim that all of it was. Again though, this is something that I plan to research more by myself sometime in the future. Until then, I will happily retain my skeptical position.

Of Heaven and Hell

I had some interesting discussions with my religious friend a while back about the Christian heaven and hell. After I read several chapters in the bible, I formulated several questions for her. This was a while back so I don't remember her specific answers, but I'll try my best to represent her views accurately.


Question
The book says heaven is perfect bliss and happiness, etc. But it also goes on to suggest that there are different "levels" of admittance into heaven. That depending on your faith and what you've done in your mortal life, you will be either greater in heaven or lesser in heaven. This is illogical. Heaven can not be perfect if there are to be levels of distinction. That implies that there are "less than perfect" parts of heaven, which would imply that these "lesser" heavens are not true heaven at all.

Her response
We can't know what heaven is like and I honestly don't know the answer to this question.

My thoughts
I appreciated the fact that she was willing to admit that she didn't know and can not know. But my question still stands. If the bible can make these claims about having "greater" treasures in heaven and also claim that heaven is perfect bliss, that seems logically incorrect to me. I was joking with my friend that if she and I both made it to heaven, she'd be perfectly happy with the giant golden palace given to her by God and I'd be perfectly happy with the little lump of coal God gave me. :)


Question
What are the absolute requirements for being "admitted" into heaven according to Christian teachings? List them for me because I'm confused.

Her response
1) Accept Jesus as your personal lord and savior*
2) God will judge you when you die and He is the only one that can decide whether you go to heaven or hell

My thoughts
I think I also brought up Jewish people, because obviously they don't accept Jesus. I think she said that they still get to go to heaven because they are bound under the old "agreement" with God. And if God is the ultimate judge, you could follow every single commandment (not just the 10, but the hundreds of commands God gives in the bible) and still not get in because He's an ass. My friend, who is a great person and a devout Christian, could be joining me in hell because she doesn't condemn me for being a non-believer, or she doesn't drag people to the edge of town and stone them to death for being gay/disobedient/etc. Of course everyone would prefer to believe that God is merciful and grants many more people into heaven than he rejects, but we can't know that to be true. He might be a hard-ass and a biblical literalist. After all, he was the one who allegedly wrote those religious texts.


Question
So God sent us Jesus because we couldn't be saved without him. But he didn't send him until 4000 years after he created man. Does that mean that every person prior to Jesus' lifetime went to hell?

Her response
Romans 4:1-3 and Romans 5:12-21

My thoughts
I forgot what she answered personally. I just read those verses she cited for me and I still don't know the answer to the question, but my guess is that the answer is "no".


Question
What about people born into native tribes that never even had the opportunity to read a bible, or meet a Christian, or even know what Christianity was? Are they all sinners that are going to hell? What wrong did they commit?

Her response
She had actually spoken about this with her former pastor and they both agreed that these tribes would get to go to heaven.

My thoughts
She has no basis for her answer other than she thinks it fits God's character. She wants to believe that God is good and thus wants to believe that he wouldn't condemn these people who haven't been exposed to Christianity. With religion, it seems to me that many people are biased in there beliefs because they believe to be true what they wish to be true, which is not a good way to determine what is true and what is not. Wishing for something to be true does not make it so.

Another thought is, what if a Christian minister came to the village and began preaching the word? What if the villagers, cemented in with their pagan beliefs, refused to accept the minister's claims as true? Do they know go to hell for not accepting Jesus? If not, at what point is one "exposed" enough to Christian teachings that their rejection of those teachings merit them eternal damnation? What about myself? Have I been exposed enough that I deserve to go to hell? Maybe I wasn't damned before because I knew so little about Christianity, but am damned now that I have undertaken a serious study of it and rejected these claims as false? If that were the case, wouldn't it be better to not expose anyone to Christianity at all? That way they are guaranteed at having a shot of going to heaven (recall, my friend is convinced that I am guaranteed to go to hell).


Question
What about children who died very young, before they had a chance to become Christian or be baptized? Are they going to hell too? Is it a sin to be born?

Her response
Honestly I can't recall. But I'm pretty dang sure that she said they would go to heaven.

My thoughts
It certainly seems that they would, since "sin" is something that we all inherit from our genealogy. I can't imagine going into a hospital and visiting the newborn area and pointing at all the days-old infants and shouting "Repent, ye evil sinners! Thou shalt be cast into the fires of hell!". Honestly, who on Earth and in their right mind could think that babies are born guilty? That's all Christianity seems to be to me. Its putting everyone on some big guilt trip for being who they are and continually having to ask forgiveness merely for being human and having faults like all other creatures. God was the one who allegedly created you with all your faults, so instead of asking forgiveness from him for being an imperfect sinner why don't you try condemning him for making you an imperfect sinner?


Question
Is heaven a place of eternal happiness, peace, and bliss? Can you really be forever happy there with God when you are up there and know that myself and many other people you've known in your mortal life are in hell, being tortured and burned and mutilated every moment of every day for the rest of eternity? Do you just "forget" about the people you knew in your life that went to hell, or do you just not care for them anymore? How can you be happy by yourself up in heaven knowing that people you once cared for are suffering in hell for all eternity?

Her response
Her answer again was that she can not know what happens when she gets to heaven.

My thoughts
Again I commend her honest response. Personally I think I asked a great question with this though. In heaven, you either lose all empathy with those you knew in life or you forget all of the souls that you once knew who are burning and suffering in hell. Or here's the third option: hell does not exist. Many Christians actually do disbelieve in hell (and for good reasons I might add). And if hell doesn't exist, maybe heaven doesn't exist either? And if heaven doesn't exist, how about going a step further and admitting that your God doesn't exist?

I know one thing for certain. If I was in heaven, I would be unhappy knowing that so many of my friends throughout life were being subjected to never-ending torture, and I would go up to God and tell him to stop it. I'd like to see a Christian agree with me on that, but I doubt many will. For to question or disagree with God is just something that they can't even contemplate doing.