Falsifiable Evidence: A continuing story of apostasy.
I’ve been asked what made me give up faith. What was the first thing that took me from the religious faith to the atheist reason I have today. How did it all begin? I’ve posted portions of my journey to apostasy in my blog, but I’ve never addressed this question.
When I was a senior in high school (remember I attended a private Catholic high school), I started having questions about what I believed and why. I thought I’d just missed something in my religious classes, so I began to attend extra classes outside my regular schooling. Here, I learned about the order of angels, the levels of hell, and other bits of catholic dogma. One evening, the topic turned to abortion and birth control. At the time, I was the most pro-life, anti-abortion person I knew, second only to my mother.
The instructor made a fatal error: he made a statement that I could research myself. You see, I cannot refute the order of angels. I cannot find evidence of the levels of hell. There is no way to discover these things, as they are not based on evidence but faith. But then I learned, “The earth is NOT overpopulated. In fact, the entire population of the earth could fit into the state of Texas and have an acre per person!!”
See, now I can research this. I can find the population of the earth is and I can find the size of Texas. I can do the math and find this is WRONG!! I’ll not do it for you; do it yourself and see what answer you reach. Before you do, though, let me finish what I was learning.
The instructor, if you can call him that, got his information from the Population Research Institute. Check out the founder and see how this came up in a Catholic class. Notice the agenda. This was clearly spelled out in the class I attended. We must be clear that overpopulation is a myth, and we have a responsibility to reproduce as many children as god (not us) sees fit.
Once I realized the only bit if falsifiable information I had ever gained from a catholic class was in fact false, I had a hard time swallowing the rest. If someone was willing to lie to be about facts I could research, what was to stop them from lying about “facts” I could not? How can I be sure ANYTHING I had been taught about my religion was not instead a part of another agenda? Could I see how a story might have been constructed simply to further an ulterior agenda? I mean, today I have the means to research and validate claims. In the time the bible was written the internet did not exist. I know the gospels were not written by actual eyewitnesses, so what stopped them from lying? Of course, they had Paul’s writings from which they could concoct a story, and if each wrote a gospel to further a separate ulterior agenda, the differences among them would make perfect sense. See, I HAD been paying attention in a few classes.
So, what have you found in your research of the world’s population and the size of Texas? I went to www.wikipedia.com for all my data. The population is roughly 6.8 billion (6,800,000,000). The area of Texas is 286,820 sq mi. A square mile is the equivalent of 640 acres. So:
286,820 sq mi X 640 acres/sq mi = 183,564,800 acres
183,564,800 acres / 6,800,000,000 people = 0.027 acres/person.
I guess it’s not bad for people who think pi = 3.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Friday, March 5, 2010
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