One characteristic I've recently come to realize I admire greatly in people is fluidity. Religions, many traditions, and many mentalities adhere to a strict set of laws which are considered "sacred" and "timeless". However, as faults in these laws come under scrutiny, it becomes apparent that one has only three options:

1. Stick to the laws no matter the circumstance.
2. Overlook the faults and pretend they don't exist while making small adjustments to the laws to make them more acceptable.
3. Realize that the laws are man-made, time-dependent, and far from perfect, and discard them completely.

Who has the right to define how you live your life, how you treat people around you, the things you can and cannot do, or even what you can eat or drink? People try to suppress what they cannot understand or accept, their memes fight a losing battle for dominion, hindering progress and destroying generations in the process.

I always find it funny to see some narrow-minded traditionalist, or religious apologist, struggling to keep up with globalization, trying in vain to close all the holes in a sinking boat. A small rubber band, trying to stretch to contain what can no longer be contained until it ruptures. The casualties of the process, however, are children that grow up in a severely contradicting environment, children who are usually not lucky enough to escape the viruses of the mind their environment is infested with....

Believers always have the amazing ability to look at an event in a completely abstract way, take it out of its surroundings, and fabricate all sorts of stories around it to make it more appealing to whatever belief they hold. As one inspects the history of religious myths, it becomes evident that none is more special, true, or even original than the others, and that religions simply evolve out of each other to escape their natural predators, logic and science.

As an example, I'll consider the myth of virgin birth. This myth is considered by two of the three Abrahamic religions as both true and exclusive to Christianity. However, after reading this article and many other articles available online, one comes to the realization that such a myth was quite common many years before, and many years after the time Christianity was established, which made it a somewhat basic requirement for Christianity to claim virgin birth to gain credibility and support.

However, with all the myths of virgin birth and divine children, and no way of confirming any of them, I find myself compelled to wonder: Is god a womanizer or simply a man-made delusion?

He saw them toiling, saw them suffering, and becoming gray for the sake of things which seemed to him entirely unworthy of this price, for money, for little pleasures, for being slightly honoured, he saw them scolding and insulting each other, he saw them complaining about pain at which a Samana would only smile, and suffering because of deprivations which a Samana would not feel.

Siddhartha
Herman Hesse

I feel truly saddened by how humans trap themselves in self-indulgent delusions and superstitions, how they let themselves be controlled by emotions and lose sight of the big picture, how they allow themselves to be reduced to mere ripples in a pool when they can be waves in the ocean....

After reading this article I couldn't get the thought of how delusional and stubborn most humans are out of my head. People insist on drawing all sorts of borders around themselves. Borders that give them their much-needed sense of specialness, but are, in fact, no more real than a mirage.

One particularly interesting piece of information mentioned in the article is that love and cocaine activate "exactly the same system" in the human brain. This makes me question the reason why love is considered noble, while taking drugs is considered very low....

In my attempt to answer this question, I recalled Aristotle's statement that happiness is the only thing that humans desire for its own sake. So what difference does it make where it comes from? I believe that one crucial difference is that, for some reason, humans like to have a side nobody understands. Accepting the fact that drugs and love give the same effect and equating them, naturally, violates that.

I find it amusing to watch so many people fighting over matters that, to them, define their humanity and make them higher than other creatures, such as the time at which a group of cells can be called "a human being", at which it is given "a soul" (whatever that means). But I truly feel saddened when these people hinder research that is critical to all mankind, in fields such as embryonic stem cells and cloning, in the name of their own beliefs.

The fact is that humans are nothing more than highly complex systems. If you start taking them apart there are no mysterious basic elements, just regular animal cells. Our lack of a full understanding of ourselves is analogous to the incomprehensibility of a supercomputer to a regular computer user. It's not impossible, it just needs time.

What are humans but a group of cells blessed and cursed with consciousness, condemned to live a short life on this small planet in a corner of the universe, limited in the spectrum of what they can sense without aid? I find it surprising that with all these constrictions humans seek to limit themselves even more. Imposing meaningless restrictions based on gender, race, beliefs, traditions, or other petty differences. I wonder what it would take to make them see....

It is in the hours of our most dire needs that we are tempted to activate the most delusional and illogical parts of our brains. Ergo, it is in these times that we should be using logic the most....

The commandments written by an omnipotent, omniscient "god":

- I am your Lord and God.
- You shall have no other gods before Me.
- You shall not make for yourself an idol.
- You shall not make wrongful use of the name of your God.
- Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.
- Honor your parents.
- You shall not murder.
- You shall not commit adultery.
- You shall not steal.
- You shall not bear false witness.
- You shall not covet your neighbor's wife.
- You shall not covet your neighbor's house.

Source

The commandments written by an atheist:

- Do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you.
- In all things, strive to cause no harm.
- Treat your fellow human beings, your fellow living things, and the world in general with love, honesty, faithfulness and respect.
- Do not overlook evil or shrink from administering justice, but always be ready to forgive wrongdoing freely admitted and honestly regretted.
- Live life with a sense of joy and wonder.
- Always seek to be learning something new.
- Test all things; always check your ideas against the facts, and be ready to discard even a cherished belief if it does not conform to them.
- Never seek to censor or cut yourself off from dissent; always respect the right of others to disagree with you.
- Form independent opinions on the basis of your own reason and experience; do not allow yourself to be led blindly by others.
- Question everything.

Source

Some additions by another atheist:

- Enjoy your own sex life (so long as it damages nobody else) and leave others to enjoy theirs in private whatever their inclinations, which are none of your business.
- Do not discriminate or oppress on the basis of sex, race or (as far as possible) species.
- Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.
- Value the future on a timescale longer than your own.

Source: Dawkins, R. (2006). The God Delusion

As much as I feel compelled to compare, I think the mere act of putting them side by side does the job....

Why is it considered wrong for most countries to have nuclear weapons? The simple answer is that nuclear weapons are too big a power for these countries to handle....

I was thinking of the power given to parents in raising their children. This power should not be underestimated. By giving two people almost complete control over the life of a child (or any number of children they deem appropriate), parents are, to a great extent, given control over the way the next generation thinks and acts. This would not be a problem if we assume that parents teach children human values and morals, the basics of how to tell right from wrong, logic and reasoning, and then allow them to explore the richness of the world around them with a free mind. However, if we go to the other extreme, we find that parents may transfer their full set of memes to their children without any sort of filtering, adjustment, or adaptation. With religious fundamentalists or extremists as well as some other cases, children are brought up in an environment that can cripple their thinking process or social activity irreversibly.

"Michael Shermer, in How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science, describes a large survey of randomly chosen Americans that he and his colleague Frank Sulloway carried out. Among their many interesting results was the discovery that religiosity is indeed negatively correlated with education (more highly educated people are less likely to be religious). Religiosity is also negatively correlated with interest in science and (strongly) with political liberalism. None of this is surprising, nor is the fact that there is a positive correlation between religiosity and parents' religiosity. Sociologists studying British children have found that only about one in twelve break away from their parents' religious beliefs."

Richard Dawkins
The God Delusion

After reading the above statistics, especially the last part, one can't help but wonder: How free are we?

In my attempt to find possible solutions for this problem, I was reminded of a post by Devil's Mind about emotional rape that I thought was relevant to the subject. As with every problem, the first step to solving it is realizing that there's a problem to begin with. Psychological damage cannot be assessed as easily as physical damage, it becomes increasingly more difficult to undo as time goes by, and worst of all, the victim is generally unaware of the damage in the cases of imposing social or religious values.

There are probably hundreds of thousands of parents who realize that the world moves forward very quickly and that to bring their children up properly they need to expect change and accept it, be open-minded, and flexible. These present a partial solution to the problem. But what about the tens of millions of parents who don't follow the same course, who think they own their children and have the right to impose whatever ideology they see fit on them?